“How did you know I—” Cora stopped herself, shaking her head in curt dismissal. How did Beulah know? How did Beulah know anything—everything? There was no use asking the girl. Even if Beulah understood her strange power, her perfect sight, there was little hope she could explain it.
“And you’re glad about it,” Beulah said. “Happy to stay here.”
Cora breathed deeply, considering her response. “I don’t know if I’m glad, precisely. I suppose that remains to be seen. But I am committed. I will see my work through.”
Cora kicked the quilt away from her feet, crawled over Beulah’s legs, and stood. She stretched, driving back the cramp and fog of daytime sleep. Her dress was wrinkled, her apron askew. Why hadn’t she thought to shed them both and sleep in her chemise? Cora clicked her tongue and shook her calico vigorously while Beulah looked on with a drowsy, tolerant smile.
“I look a proper mess,” Cora said. “I was so fretful over you, I never stopped to think about bedclothes.”
“And you were tired. Up all night, watching over me.”
“Yes.” So the girl had seen that, too. Or perhaps she had merely guessed. Cora was her mother, after all; no mother could sleep soundly while her child was in danger. “At least I removed my boots before I crawled into bed. Thank God for small mercies.”
Cora slid her feet into the old brown boots, all soft leather and familiar creases. She laced and tied them quickly. The haze of slumber was lifting now, and an industrious energy had taken root inside her. Work called—the land outside, eager and companionable, warm and growing beneath a strengthening sun. How long would it take her to wake the Bemis land, she wondered, and where ought she to begin? The prospect would have filled her with dread once, or at least a shrinking feeling of inadequacy, for the farm was vast and hectic and she was but one woman. Now, she felt merely curious. Interested and ready.
“If Nettie Mae has been kind enough to fix us supper,” Cora said, “then I truly ought to run back across the field and change into something more presentable. It won’t do, to go to table looking like a dirty dish rag. Your dress is hung up there on the peg; you may put it on when you feel strong enough to stand. Nettie Mae brushed it out for you; the back was red with sand after you’d lain on the riverbank.”
“I feel strong enough now.” Beulah swung her legs over the side of the mattress. She clung to the bedpost and pulled herself to her feet. She remained at the bedpost for some time, holding tight, experimenting with her balance. Then she stepped away and walked easily across the room. The clean calico went swiftly over her head, and Cora helped her with the back buttons. Beulah reached for her pinafore. Then she paused and stepped back. She left the pinafore hanging on its peg.
“I’ll help you down the stairs,” Cora said, “to be sure you don’t tumble. You must be careful about such things for a few more days, at least. Then I’ll go and change for supper. You’re to remain near this bed—doctor’s orders—but I’ll take Benjamin and Charles back home tonight. They can help me unpack our most pressing necessities. I suppose we’re behind on our planting and our fence mending; we must all work hard this summer to catch up with our chores before the autumn comes.”
Beulah put on her boots, then stood and faced Cora. “I’m ready.”
How tall the girl had grown. She could scarcely be called a girl any longer; Beulah was poised on the edge of a new season. For a moment, one brief, trembling heartbeat, Cora wished for the power to stop time, to halt the turning of the wheel. Where had the child gone—silent in Cora’s lap, transfixed by the prairie, staring in wonder at the grand, wild possibility of the world? She tidied Beulah’s hair with her hands, tucking loose locks behind her ears. Gently, Cora laid the tip of her finger against Beulah’s lip, just where the seed head had brushed it years ago.
Then she kissed her daughter’s cheek. “I’m ready, too.”
As they descended the staircase, Beulah clung to the banister with one hand and held tight to Cora’s arm with the other. They went slowly, one step at a time, but Cora could already feel strength returning to her child’s body—strength, vitality, and exuberance as lush as the summer that lay waiting just ahead. There was nothing left to fear on Beulah’s account. She would be well, she would thrive, here in the place where her roots ran deep.
“Supper smells delicious,” Beulah said. “Nettie Mae is a fine cook, but I never smelled anything like this from her kitchen before.”
Halfway down the stairs, the sounds of cheerful work reached Cora. She could hear Nettie Mae directing the children in a voice both light and warm. “Benjamin, dear, can you carry that pitcher of water to the table, or is it too heavy for you? Don’t drop it. Charles, we need one more plate. There, now. Doesn’t the table look pretty? Oh, Miranda, what lovely flowers you’ve picked! Let me fill a cup with water, and you may set them on the table. Right there, in the center, so everyone may see.”
“Flowers,” Cora said, quietly amused. “Nettie Mae has made an occasion of it.”
Then they reached the final steps and the kitchen came into view. Cora’s feet froze on the stair. Her breath caught in her chest; she pressed a hand there, staring in shock, and felt the rapid beat of her heart. Nettie Mae had laid the table with the president’s china. The mellow light of evening struck its gilded rims with sweet fire. The pattern of cobalt-blue vines and flowers glowed against a fine white tablecloth. The little ones hurried to their seats, faces shining as they looked up at Cora. Nettie Mae pulled out a chair. She lifted a hand in a summoning gesture—that imperious manner was as much a part of Nettie Mae as her wits and determination—but she smiled.
“I . . . I need to change my dress,” Cora said.
“Nonsense,” Nettie Mae replied. “You’ll take too long, and we’re all famished. Aren’t we, children?”
Cora went to the table and sank into her chair, trembling. She stared down at her plate—that implausible treasure, too fine for a prairie woman—afraid to touch the china, convinced it would vanish under her hands and dissolve like a dream.
“Come, Beulah,” Nettie Mae said, and helped the girl to her chair. “I’ve already called for Clyde; he’ll be in shortly. He is putting the sheep in their fold. I hope you don’t mind, Beulah, if I seat him next to you.”
Nettie Mae presided over the table a moment longer—arranging the covered serving dishes just so, fussing with the placement of her saltcellar. Then she took the empty chair at Cora’s side. Clyde stamped up the steps and swung the kitchen door open, calling greetings to Miranda and the boys. Then he went at once to the drain board, washed his hands and face, and took the last remaining chair. Cora noted the sideways dart of his eyes, the tiny, pleased smile when he found Beulah at his side.
“Let us say grace.” Nettie Mae reached out, and Cora responded without hesitation. Their hands fit easily together.
BEULAH
Her ma did go across the field that evening, taking the little boys with her. Cora had spoken the truth: there was much work to be done, lost ground to regain before the seasons turned again, and the sooner they began their labors, the easier next winter would be. Beulah sat on the back steps of the Webber house, resting her back against the sod bricks, watching as her mother led Charles and Benjamin through the pasture. Night was coming down in that slow and careless way it has when springtime is fading, and summer rolls in to take its place. Summer is never in a hurry; it lingers and stretches and savors the light. Beulah meant to do the same. Evening songs of crickets and roosting birds filled the air, calling to her from the line of the cottonwoods—as did the distant scent of the river, all warm spice of leaves and slow water in its eddies.
Nettie Mae and Clyde were seeing to the dishes and to Miranda. There was no one about to check Beulah, no one to plead with her to be cautious. For her part, Beulah knew she was well enough for a stroll. Her legs felt sturdy, and though her head still ached a little, the ache didn’t pound as terribly as it had done on waking. It was a small thing now, no more troubl
e to bear than the itch of a mosquito’s bite. She slipped quietly from the steps and made for the river trail, whispering to the sheep as she passed their fold.
The deep red glory of sunset was fading by the time Beulah stood over Substance’s grave. The clearing was still, save for a rustle of wind through the undergrowth. Beulah turned in a slow circle, face tipped up toward a purple sky, listening, waiting. The river spoke between its banks, repeating the tale it always told of high, cold places and endless snow, of the tumble of stone and the great, eternal wearing away—a story Beulah never tired of hearing. A few frogs still called among the cottonwoods, and high in the branches, one last thrasher whistled and paused, waiting for a distant reply. A white curve—the sickle of the moon—hung faint and waning above the slope of the foothills. Otherwise, the place was abandoned.
Beulah tipped the coyote skull gently with the toe of her boot. Its teeth had sunk into the red soil, leaving impressions just where Clyde had placed it. She could all but hear the words Clyde had said to his father when he had come, at last, to the grave—those words he had whispered in his heart.
“The world has passed to us now,” Beulah said. “To Clyde and to me. We’ll make of it what we choose.”
No one spoke from below the earth, or from the space just above. Substance had stretched himself thin and wide, till the world took him back into itself and made him anew. He was somewhere down the river now, merging his great forceful self with the surge of the current, or perhaps he was among the crows on the barn roof—waiting within their bodies to become the egg in the nest, and then the fledgling, meek and small, and then a black bird winging across the fields. He was the seed in the seed head, fat and full with root and stem, or the pale, small egg secured to its leaf. The coyote slipping through shadows.
“Gone,” Beulah said, and sighed, and smiled. She bent over his grave, straightening the coyote skull among the white-starred vines that surrounded it. Then she turned and headed back toward home.
As she walked the river trail, something small and pale caught Beulah’s eye, lying in the dust. She picked up the corn seed, rolling it in her fingers, admiring the secretive flecks of scarlet dotting the hard yellow coat. She put the seed in her mouth and sucked it while she walked, swallowed down the clinging dust with its blunt taste of dry earth. When she took the seed from her mouth again, it was shiny and bright as a jewel, even in the dim shade of twilight.
Something small and lively crackled in the brush beside her—a rat, perhaps, or one of the ground-dwelling birds that hopped and pecked among the undergrowth. She peered into the tangled hedge but never saw the creature. Instead, she found an animal track pressed into the soil. She crouched to examine the track—the round fleshy pad, the four toes, the elegant symmetry of the whole arrangement. She could see how the dust had shifted at the rear of the pawprint, stirred by the animal’s speed. A coyote, moving at a rapid trot along the verge of the trail.
Beulah pressed the corn seed down into the coyote’s track, pressed till the soil gave way and the earth took her offering, and the red dust closed over the place to hide the seed while it dreamed.
“Grow,” she whispered.
Then she stood, brushed her hands together, and left the cottonwoods behind.
AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow was an unusual work for me. I’ve grown used to writing historical fiction that cleaves closely to true events, and although the bare bones of this story are based on a real chapter of my family’s history—one I found too intriguing to resist—I gave myself the freedom to bend and twist reality to suit a larger artistic vision. But my readers have come to expect detailed notes at the ends of my stories, delineating facts and explaining where and why I deviated from the truth. Some readers have even said they find my notes almost as interesting as the stories themselves. So I feel I must tell you, in brief, the true story of the Bemis and Webber clans, and how this novel came to be.
After The Ragged Edge of Night was finished and safely committed to the editing process, I spent some time considering what theme I ought to explore in my second book with Lake Union Publishing. For reasons I still don’t entirely understand, I was certain I wanted to write about death—my relationship to the sacred end, my private thoughts on the endless cycle of life. Perhaps the theme of death called to me so strongly because I’d spent several months researching the horrors of World War II for Ragged Edge. Maybe it was because my old cat Tron, who had been my dearest friend for the whole of my adult life, was rapidly failing in health, succumbing to cancer of the kidneys. Whatever the cause, I felt called to share with the world a different perspective on death—a consecration of the great unknown. I wanted to set death in its rightful place: not as a thing to cringe from with superstitious dread, but a natural process that unites all forms of life.
When I considered death—and considered it from my own reverent perspective—I fixated on my great-grandparents Clyde and Beulah Webber, for aside from family pets, theirs were the first deaths I ever knew.
Clyde and Beulah were my great-grandparents, the mother and father of my maternal grandma, Georgia Grant. I have the most wonderful memories of visiting Grandma and Grandpa Webber throughout my childhood. My mother would load my sister and me into the car and drive from Seattle to Eugene, Oregon, where my great-grandparents lived in their later years, as often as she could manage, for she had been close to her grandparents all her life. I loved those visits, especially at Christmastime. My great-grandparents’ home was a wonderful time capsule, full of historic wonders like the player piano into which my sister and I would feed scroll after scroll, mesmerized by the old-fashioned music and the automatic dancing of the keys.
Clyde was witty and mischievous. He gave every member of our family a nickname—mine was Squeaky—and would refer to them by no other name. I remember, at the age of eight or nine, standing with my feet on the bottom rail of Beulah’s garden gate, swinging slowly back and forth amid her lovely flowers, while Clyde leaned against the fence, teasing me good naturedly. “What are they teaching you in school, Squeaky? I hope they ain’t told you the earth is round, ’cause it’s flatter than a pancake.”
In his youth, he had been a sheep rancher and a brilliant horse trainer, and after he and Beulah married, they lived in a tiny wagon—the kind Romany Travellers called home—out on the Wyoming plains. But when modernization caught up to him, Clyde adapted to the times. He trained and sold a matched pair of Percheron draft horses and used the money to buy a Ford truck. He became a long-haul trucker from then on, and eventually settled with his young family in Eugene.
Beulah was as far removed from her portrayal in this novel as it’s possible to imagine. She was a busy, fluttering, anxious woman, a meticulous housekeeper and gardener who never ceased to talk. (Clyde nicknamed her Windy for her prodigious gusts of speech.) She had a habit of placing little stickers on the undersides of every object in her home, labeling everything with a name: who was to receive that item after she died. Beulah left me her beautiful cranberry-glass candy dish, which she always kept full of old-fashioned ribbon candy, and which I raided eagerly every time my family came for a visit. That candy dish is among my most treasured possessions to this day.
Clyde and Beulah certainly loved one another deeply and lived to a ripe old age in one another’s company. Their love, and their origins on the Wyoming frontier, are almost the only fragments of truth in this novel, though the general premise sprang from a true event—an event I uncovered by grilling my grandma Georgia and her cousin, Mona, about our family’s history.
You see, one of the relics Beulah handed down was a gorgeous carved wood box, its lid decorated with a checkerboard pattern and her maiden initials: B. B. The sticker on the underside of the box bore my mother’s name, along with the cryptic note Daddy carved it while in jail. I had to know how Beulah’s father, Charles Ernest Bemis, had ended up in jail. Grandma Georgia readily supplied the details.
&n
bsp; “He stole a wagonload of apples from a neighbor’s orchard,” my grandma told me, “because his own crops had failed that year, and he was afraid the kids would starve.”
That sounded like a pretty good incitement for a novel, but Grandma had still more juicy familial gossip. She went on, “The real bad thing about it was, once he ended up in jail, his wife and the neighbor lady had to move in together. It was the only way they could get through the winter with two farms to run between them. But they hated each other’s guts by that time, because Cora had caught Ernest and the neighbor lady fooling around in the bushes a little while before. That neighbor lady turned out to be my other grandma—Clyde’s mom.”
Ahh—now I had the bones of my story!
As I sifted through more conversations with my grandma and her cousin, and as I scoured genealogy sites for more facts about my family, the picture of my novel grew clearer. By the time the real Ernest Bemis ended up in jail for stealing his neighbor’s apples, Nettie Mae’s first husband had already died of unrelated causes. (His name was Benjamin, but his father was called Substance, and I couldn’t resist using such an unusual name for my character.) However, the enmity between Cora and Nettie Mae was real—as was their distress at finding themselves forced to cooperate for the sake of their respective children.
I can well imagine that the year they spent living together was difficult for them both, given the sordid events that had transpired between the Bemis and Webber clans. But when these two women merged their households together, Clyde and Beulah had occasion to grow closer, and soon fell in love.
That settled it; the juxtaposition of love and hate beneath the same roof was too tempting for a novelist to resist. With these scraps of my family history, I set about constructing a plausible scenario to tell the story that was tugging at my heart.
As I researched the Bemis and Webber families—delving deep into genealogical records, squinting at scans of handwritten journals, and poring over old photographs of sod-brick houses—I learned of Cora’s origins and the existence of the president’s china. She was indeed the illegitimate daughter of Samuel Grant, brother to Ulysses, and the president did gift Cora a beautiful and expensive china set long after he’d left the White House. I believe the china set was intended as a heartfelt gift, not a bribe to buy Cora’s silence, but I realized that if I rolled back time and set this story a couple of decades earlier, during Ulysses Grant’s actual presidency, I could leverage the china as a point of tension between Cora and Nettie Mae—a symbol of Cora’s illegitimacy and the unforgivable stain on her soul (unforgivable from Nettie Mae’s perspective, at least).
One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow: A Novel Page 48
