Victoria looked away from the wild urgings of Mrs. Winberg’s raised eyebrows. Why disappoint this woman whose affection she craved? But she couldn’t take advantage of these good people—people who were what they seemed—as light and sweet inside as out. If she married Karl Winberg in order to gain a loving mother, she and Karl would sit downstairs in that parlor each night—Karl smiling, nodding, uttering not a word to drown out the dark howling in her head. She was not a simple person. She stood.
“Let me go down first, Mrs. Winberg. You put your hand on my shoulder.”
*
As Victoria tried to rub the dirt from the potato patch off her red, raw fingers, all the long ago images of the house on Station Street—the walnut paneled dining room, the handsome mantle in the parlor, the sunlit upstairs room where she could paint—folded into themselves like a big picture post card, just something seen on a tour.
Just then Alice came around the corner of the house and squatted down beside her in the potato patch. Victoria was so glad to see her little girl—hair in a terrible tangle, hat hanging by its string—her teeth gritted against the sting in her nose.
“Where’d you girls go, darlin’? You didn’t say goodbye.”
“I sold Lillian Gish for a lot of money. It’s for the china.” Alice began to pull dollar bills from her coat pocket, and the wind caught one, lifting it up above the garden like a dry leaf. Alice leaped for it, but the wind drove it down again, and Victoria flattened herself on the potato mound to trap it.
“Goodness, gracious,” Victoria said, sitting up and dusting off her long apron. The rest of the money fluttered, safe in Alice’s grip. The wind had driven tears in clean white streaks across Alice’s dusty cheeks. Victoria glanced at the house. “Let’s go in, darlin’, it’s so cold out here.” She handed the dollar back to Alice, put the potatoes in her apron pocket, and struggled to her feet. Already her swelling belly had made her clumsy.
The wind pushed them towards the house, and Victoria took hold of the railing to steady herself up the back steps. It would only torment the child to say she shouldn’t have sold the pig. How could her parents have let things come to such a pass! Holding the door against the wind so Alice could enter, she suddenly knew she hadn’t made a choice at all fifteen years ago. A creature like herself, a witness to wickedness, was simply ineligible for the Winbergs’ easy happiness.
Inside the kitchen, Victoria sank down in a chair and opened her arms to hug Alice. Such a short little bundle. When she opened her eyes, Dan was standing in the doorway, smiling his indelible smile. MacGaffin was behind him in the dining room, silent and waiting, as still as a dark painting.
“Hello, pumpkin,” Dan said to Alice, “we were worried about you and your sister this morning. I suppose the scholarly Felicity has gone on to school?”
“I got a lot of money for my pig,” Alice said.
“That’s swell, Alice. It couldn’t have come at a better time.” Dan stepped forward and reached out his hand.
“It’s for the china,” Alice said softly.
“That’s nice,” he said.
Alice looked to her mother, but Victoria turned her head away and covered her mouth. How could MacGaffin take this little girl’s money? He’d undoubtedly overheard this conversation, and if he were a decent man, he’d rush forward and say they had another week, and he’d send over a load of coal because this little girl deserved it. How could he be so heartless, leaving them here with no china to paint, no pig to fatten, all her plans cut off. She clamped her hand tighter on her mouth. And you, Dan, how can you do this, after saying you’d find the mortgage payment yourself? How can you, a grown man and a father, take your eight-year-old daughter’s money rather than go out and get a job like other men. She dropped her hand.
“Dan?” she asked. “Isn’t there any other way?”
He looked at her, his face naked, innocent. “Vic? Don’t fuss and make things harder on Alice here.” He held out his hand for the money.
“Mama?” Alice asked and Victoria had to face her and take in a shuddering breath and make a little smile and nod so that the little girl would know that it was with her mother’s blessings that she would give up her plans.
Dan and Mr. MacGaffin went out the front door.
“Why did you let him do that?” Alice cried.
“Now, sweetheart,” Victoria spoke softly and reached out to gather Alice in her arms. But Alice darted away and ran for the stairs. Victoria let her go. Alice deserved a good cry, and since it was all she was going to get, her mother wasn’t going to try to talk her out of it.
Victoria stepped to the sink and rested her hands on the cool edge. Through the window she watched little twisters of dust dance above the empty potato patch. The pig house would be broken up and tossed into the stove. Dwindling. Everything dwindling. Victoria covered her face and sobbed, “Mama!”
THE END
RETURN TO LINCOLN
1894
And what of Dan, that sweet, broken man, that bitterly disappointing husband? What had convinced such a confident talker that he would never amount to anything?
I, Daniel Slocum Hale, would have been the runt of the litter if there’d been a litter, but I was an only child and believed I was David and Goliath all rolled into one—smart and brave, a boy who had ideas. The son of a pretty school teacher and a man who’d fought with Colonel Chamberlain in the Army of the Potomac, I thought myself a kind of eleven-year-old aristocrat with musical talent that would begin to show itself as soon as we’d settled into our new home, and Mother and I had more time for my piano lessons. Even though she was a Quaker, she was teaching me to play the Methodist hymns.
When Father galloped toward the plank-flat, purple horizon of Oklahoma Territory to register our claim, I stood on the wagon seat and waved my bandanna, hailing the start of our new life as landowners. Tomorrow morning when the claims office opened, Dad would sign his name, buying us the right to break the sod, plant, build a cabin, and make improvements on our 160 acres. After five years, an inspector would come around to judge our fences, barns and sheds, our fine house with glass windows and an iron stove, and then it would be our farm forever, and we’d buy more land with the profits.
Everything was going according to plan. In Wichita we’d stopped to buy fencing wire, meal and bacon, a bushel of sweet potatoes and enough butter to refill our crock. Right now the crock was sitting in a little eddy in the creek, and our wagon, loaded with everything worth taking from our dried up place near Broken Bow, Nebraska, stood beside the creek that ran through our claim. We had nine boxes of fruit jars with enough of Mother’s pickled peaches, corn relish and canned tomatoes to go to Glory with.
As Dad rode out of sight, the sun was just bulging up, and I figured today after breakfast, Mother and I’d get started making this our home. A small fire flickered where she’d made coffee and fried bread for Dad and I was sure hungry, but when she turned from her own waving goodbye to Dad to offer me a hand down from the wagon seat, her smile looked so stretched across her face, I let her take my hand and hold it after I’d jumped down.
“It’s going to be a perfectly splendid day, Danny Boy. Let’s walk and see every inch of our land.” Her eyes were wide and sparkling. I grabbed a gunny sack and Dad’s Winchester in case I saw a quail or a rabbit, and we took off, Mother walking fast and talking fast, praising the land and the sky, noting each little wild flower and calling out the names of the crops we’d plant—wheat and oats and corn, barley and sorghum and hay. And we’d have geese for feather beds and start up a library. All the way from Nebraska she’d been sober as a judge.
As we walked, I collected buffalo chips in the gunny, and when it was nearly noon, coaxed her back in the direction of the wagon. “How about some breakfast?” I said and threw down the chips near the fire.
“And the house, son, a sod cabin right now, but after the harvest, we’ll have a board house with glass windows and plaster. And any can stay the night once the house is b
igger, and Sister May will always have a place here, as well.”
The day we left Lancaster County, Aunt May came to see us off and gave me two little books, Mr. Longfellow’s poems, which she said would be improving. The other was empty, a travelogue, she said, in which I could record my own adventures. But if I ever had what you’d call an adventure—getting kidnapped by Indians or discovering gold—I wouldn’t want to write it down where others could read it and tell. I’d want to do all the telling myself.
When Dad came back, Mother was quiet, all her big talk over. Dad’s roan was packed with a special sod plow, more oil for the lamp and a new shovel. We dug a storm cellar, nine by twelve, and deeper, Dad said, than an ordinary dugout, his being so extra tall. This would be a cellar for storing potatoes and such, and would also serve as a shelter from tornadoes, and for the next few days, while Dad and I cut sod for the sod house, a place for us to take cover if it rained. Dad laid branches from the jacks across the top of the great rectangular hole. Then from near the creek bank, we cut big bricks of sod, overlapping them on the branches, grass side up, to make a roof. Very carefully I laid on my belly across this roof and sealed all the cracks with mud.
We used the short ladder from the back of the wagon to step down into the cellar. We made a doorframe, and Dad slanted it back to meet the roof and fastened across a sheepskin so raindrops would drain away from the opening. The ladder was too far down to be much use to me, so I just jumped onto our nice, cool packed dirt floor. It was fun to run across the plain of Oklahoma Territory and then by-golly-disappear with one leap like a prairie dog.
The earth was very dry except beside the creek, and the sod crumbled when we tried to cut more bricks to make the sod house. Dad said we needed to wait for rain. We still had the wagon sheet up and left lots of things there including Mother’s best trunk with the lace curtains and her books. But everything else, including the beds, we carried down into the pitch-dark dugout. Mother didn’t want to put our good carpet on the dirt floor, so we left that in the wagon rolled in the oilcloth. We didn’t have room for the little armless rocking chair.
Inside the dugout Mother laid a white lace tablecloth over the biggest trunk and put her silver hairbrush and hand mirror on top, then she drove a stick into the wall and hung up their wedding picture. Mother had said she couldn’t live in a dugout, so we called it the root cellar.
The first night, talking about how tired she was, she got into bed with Dad. In my little bed I lay in total blackness listening to the clods fall from the dirt ceiling onto the lid to the slop jar. Soon, I heard Dad start snoring. Then Mother got up. She took the afghan off the foot of the bed and, reaching high to grab the doorframe to steady herself, climbed up the little ladder. Since Dad’s return she hadn’t talked of future crops or glass windows. She hung over the wash and the cooking like an old woman. She never slept one night underground.
One night, after she’d left the dugout with her afghan, I got up and climbed out, too. The top step of the ladder barely got me head high out of the ground, but I could hoist myself out if I had to, which I did very quietly so as not to wake Dad. Like a gopher coming out of the ground, I blinked in the bright moonlight. Then I looked in the wagon, but Mother wasn’t there. The oilcloth was pulled off her best trunk which stood open. I rushed to the creek. There, standing in the water in her Sunday dress, its black silk billowing out in the current, Mother stood, trying to throw a rope into a tree above. “Mother?” I called, trying to keep a steady voice and stepping further down the bank, so she could see me.
“Hello, Danny Boy.” She teetered, trying to keep her footing in the stiff current. “Go on, now,” she said softly, “back to bed with you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said and took a few slow steps up the bank. Then I ran, tore the hide off the dugout and screamed. “Dad, come save her.”
Dad nearly knocked me down, flying out of the dugout. He ran to the creek and I raced after him.
“Olivia Jane, in God’s name!” He tore into the water, knocking her down. For a moment both were under water. He came up choking and snorting, but there was not a sound from her. With her in his arms like a baby, he scrambled up the bank where he set her on her feet. He bent, still choking. She darted back to the water, but he grabbed and swung his right arm back.
“Don’t,” I yelled and grabbed his arm. He turned with such force, he hurled me to the ground. Then he dragged us both to the dugout. As though I was nothing, he dropped me inside. “Hand up the ladder,” he yelled. I did. The hide fell across the opening. I tried to get hold of the doorframe above me, but I was way too short. Again and again, I jumped, clawing the dirt.
I stopped and dusted off my hands, then felt my way along the wall to the box with the bucket, and the cupboard and then the foot of my bed. The smell of coal oil was powerful, and I figured he’d knocked over the lamp on his scramble out. Sitting on the side of the bed in total darkness with not a sound coming through the earth, I saw her before my eyes, circled all around by the bright light on the water, her arms reaching upward. Too late I realized that this must have been the Inner Light of Christ she’d always talked about, what the Quakers wait quietly for, and there it was surrounding her like a Christmas wreath on the water. The Inner Light had come from her for some sort of Quaker baptism—something I shouldn’t have spied on, something my father had wrecked. I waited a long time in the darkness for the two of them to straighten out this misunderstanding.
Trying not to breath the lamp oil fumes, I gave them plenty of time—time for her to take off her wet clothes and spread them on a bush. Time for him to build a fire, and for both of them to put on dry things. Time for them to say how sorry they were I’d had to suffer in the ground, and how they would go now and slide down the little ladder and each of them would reach down so that both could have a hand in rescuing their boy from his prison.
My bed began to make a steady squeak, and my teeth rattled before I realized too much time had passed. She was dead, and he had killed her. After another long stretch, the darkness in front of my face no longer held our fine things, the bedsteads and the quilts and the wedding picture. It was just a smothering blackness. If she was alive, she’d have made him let me out. He was burying her, and would saddle his roan and ride away, for he had already buried me.
*
I was all cried out by the time the hide was pulled away and cool air fell in.
“Son,” my father’s voice said, “come out now and help me.” All our things came back around me—faint images in the darkness of the quilts and the wedding picture—but they looked strange and uncertain. The ladder slid down, but I pulled back into the corner.
“Come now, son. Don’t be afraid.”
I got off the bed and stepped up on the ladder, high enough to see my father’s bare feet and his hairy shins in his shrunk up long johns. His hair was full of grass and his face was bleeding, his mustache wet, the huge, moonlit sky behind him. I backed down the ladder, but he spoke again, his voice rough like his throat was hoarse. “Come on. It’s all over.” He reached in and grabbed my hand.
Dad had already tethered his roan to one side of the back of the wagon and Sally to the other. The calf nuzzled her udders. On the open tailgate between them sat a woman wearing my mother’s Sunday dress. Her eyes were closed and her head hung to one side. A rope tied round and round held her arms to her sides and lashed in the folds of the black silk.
As the sky grew lighter, Dad made a thousand trips, in and out of the dugout, carrying our clothes and bedding and most of the canning. When he was finally done, he sat on the wagon and wrote on a piece of Mother’s stationary. He told me to go down into the dugout to see if there was anything I wanted and to leave the letter on the table.
It was hard to make myself go down into that dark hole. The oil lamp was cleared out, and I could hardly see. He’d left the bedsteads and most of the other furniture, but the picture was gone and all Mother’s nice fix-ups. I stood in the light from the door and
read the letter:
To any man who reads this
You are welcome to take shelter on my claim. The water in the crek is good, and hard tack is in red box under the big bed. My family has been called away on account of sickness. We will return by erly October.
James Elliott Hale
August 31, 1890
After he pulled me out of the dugout, Dad handed me up to sit on the wagon seat beside him, and here I was in Mother’s place. We rolled away from the creek onto the bald prairie where there’d be no place to hide if Mother and I made a run for it. The wind pushed us from the west, tearing at the wagon sheet, rattling all the hanging pots and pans like bones clattering. I had no choice about going, but where he was taking us, I didn’t know. I knew only I mustn’t get separated from her again.
“Where’re we going?” I asked
“Back to Nebraska.”
“She looks crooked. Why’d you tie her up?”
My father wiped his hand down his mustache and looked long to the north. “Your mother’s got a cryin’ sickness. We gotta keep her safe.”
The rest of the day my mind kept grinding, over and over, why hadn’t I managed to pile up some furniture and climb out to save her from the licking he’d given her? What kind of boy was I?
*
When Dad untied her the first night, so she could change her clothes, she moved about like a china doll that would break if she bumped anything. While he made the fire, I walked around to where she had sat back down on the tailgate. Something about her, just sitting there, not working, made me timid. Her hair was half loose, a bluish bruise showed on her chin, and her blouse was buttoned up crooked. “Mother?”
One Hundred Years of Marriage Page 10
