Bottomland

by Michelle Hoover

  I let myself out. At the alley’s end, the factories spilled their workers for the night. It was late again. It always was. The cold ran under my collar, the tips of my ears hard as nickels. I watched for the girls, but I didn’t watch much. I would sleep the night in the alley. My legs just fit across. My blanket was a sorry piece of rough, but I had a dollar in my pocket. It was enough for a bite when the sun broke. I didn’t want to remember the other tickets I’d bought. I didn’t want to dream. When I thought of my sisters now, there wasn’t a door to open. At home, not a hand on my shoulder. Out the window of the train, the fields under the snow would be straight as a sheet. As if such a thing as Chicago never was.

  I stopped before the alley crossed into the street. Another set of tracks, when not one of those workers had taken to the alley yet. The tracks ran up next to my own, but turned around. They were small and scraping, flat-footed like. I followed them best I could, around the corner and up a dark path. Around another corner then, where those tracks mixed with dozens of others. Far off under a streetlight, a girl was walking fast. Her hair was a dark cap, a barn coat on her shoulders. Corduroy, that coat was, and hanging on her like a tent.

  I ran. Around another corner. Across the bricked and muddy streets. The girl was running now too, but the snow kept her footprints. At every turn, she looked back. Sure enough, with her mouth open and that look on her face. Sure who it was. Through every alley, she ducked off. I spun on my heel. When she slipped around a line of trucks, the street twirled as if pulled by a string. My knees hit the ground, the snow soaking. The many times I’d missed her, I’d never been so close. I caught my breath and stumbled on.

  But the next street was a blank. And the one after that. Now the Loop was awash with snowmelt and traffic. The trains clattered above. Every footstep, it was lost. My feet ached with a fire in them. I dropped my hands to my knees, my head spinning. There were alleys every hundred feet. Shop doors and overhangs. Plenty to hide a person. The streetlights over my head, they were some bright. A whole city of them. What was the use of so much light?

  “Lee.”

  There she was, or the shadow of her. Where she stood across from me on the walk, Esther looked older. That coat big on her shoulders. Her hair was a helmet, her face bone-thin. But there were those freckles, even on her lips. So many, they made her darker than the rest of us. She wiped her cheek.

  “I found you,” I said.

  She wiped her cheek again. “Don’t be stupid. You didn’t find me, Lee. And that’s what you’ll say when you go back.”

  “But I can’t.”

  “You didn’t find me. You didn’t find Myrle. You’ll go back because she can’t be found.”

  She took a step into the street. She looked wild, shivering. “She can’t,” she said. “Not ever.” And then the words that would undo me. Even she knew that. “I told you not to go, but you did. You owe me.”

  I coughed into my hand. My eyes burned, my whiskers were wet. When I looked up, the street was empty. The lights gleamed. I searched the sidewalks, only boxes and crates, piles high as rubbish and no Esther. But there in the snow melt, two footprints. If it hadn’t been for that, I might have thought Esther was only in my head. My ears were ringing some hard. My feet like blazes. I sat in the snow so I wouldn’t have to stand, reached my hand over those tracks. Sure enough, Esther had been there. And she had told me what she wanted. She always did.

  But what she said about Myrle, I couldn’t figure it. She can’t. Not ever. Myrle, I hadn’t seen her once.

  I woke on a bench by the lake. My head was aching, my blanket wrapped around my chest. I stabbed at my ear. My bag was gone, but I still had my dollar and the tickets in my pocket. The city, it was a low run of traffic. In front of me, the moon showed on the lake. That light seemed a tunnel, promising something different. The sky above was fresh, the stars big as smarts. I could smell fish. A slow kind of wave that sounded thick with ice. At my back, the city was humming. A train in the morning. That way was home. But the water in front of me was wide open. That’s what I liked. Wide was safer. It gave a person a choice. If you could leave parts of yourself behind, the parts you didn’t like. If you could only do that. Since the blast, I’d known a thing or two that was close. At the hospital when I first woke, it was just me and a wool blanket on my chest. Me and the ringing in my head. The rest of the world seemed finished. It was strange to let go like that, even for a minute. Strange but easy, as if I’d never done anything wrong. At home, Father had said it too. Look at this, he’d said, his hand out over the wide open fields to show us.

  I reached into my pocket, unfolded a piece of paper. The telegram was soaked. The type no bigger than a pebble. I read the words twice over. come home. Underneath, in blurry ink, it said something that felt worse: she’s been found.

  Part IV: Needles or Pins

  ESTHER

  I

  We had to get away. Myrle took the key from Father’s bedside, and I found the rope in the shed. Myrle would test that key herself, but it was me who unlocked the door that night and stepped off the porch. Me who’d tied the rope to the window and ran to the back of the house to help Myrle drop. She clung to the rope like a tired shirt. “Phsst,” I whistled when I caught her legs. “Did you fix the door?” She nodded quick. The rope snapped against the house when we gave it a pull and fell at our feet. Myrle shuddered but I put a finger to her lips. Only the groan of Father sleeping and the trees against the gutters, the wind pitching the fields and the dark far over our heads. Not an inch of the house moved, what with everyone asleep, the doors closed and locked, and the cold enough for blankets. We had our boots and Lee’s old trousers. We had the barn coats. I carried two loaves of bread under my arm and a bag tied to my back, Myrle with another as light as we could have it. I took her hand. We ran across the yard, over the grass until the grass became fields, and out to the pasture. Scrags of corn stuck up here and there, watching us. A dog wailed, one of the Elliots’, and Myrle snapped her head to look. But the Elliot boy was done, I told her. She wasn’t going to go there anymore.

  The pasture led to the road along a path the cows had marked with grazing. Myrle walked in front and I followed, my fingers to her back. The moon was low to the ground, large as a house and barn put together. Then it was gone. I couldn’t see Myrle but for the sound of her sniffling. I couldn’t see my feet. But she was with me. Going better than I would’ve thought and not so much a word of worry, though I knew she did. When we came to the road, it was a white dust that showed itself between the dark of the fields like a bridge. We could go for hours before it turned light. We could make our way to Clarksville by next nightfall, some twenty miles, and the train after that. Father always said a person without a moon might wander off and be lost, fall into a ditch, a snake underfoot, or an ankle break, and no one would know to search him out. But that was just poor luck.

  “Look,” Myrle said and stopped short. An animal crouched in the dark of the road with its nose up. It jumped when I gave a whistle and vanished. “What was that?” she asked.

  “A fox.”

  “I’m tired of foxes.” She lifted the soles of her boots as if to show me how they ached.

  “Remember?” I took her hand to pull her along, but she shook her head. The way she left her bed for mine when she was scared to sleep, I reminded her, and the picture in the magazine. Do you dread the day? the advertisement said. Does washing tire you? Do you feel discouraged by the weary monotony of the old way? The woman in the picture wore a pink dress, a black square of ribbon on her collar and sleeves. In a washhouse, she stood with her hand on a crank, the other palm up as if holding a cup of tea, and not so much as a blush of heat on her cheeks. Father would have my hide for looking, let alone taking the magazine from the market for free, but I had to think someplace there were women like this. Hurley’s Electric Washers, the advertisement said, of Greater Chicago. I kept that magazine under the mattress tic
king, folded it in a newspaper should Nan change the sheets.

  “That’s somebody, isn’t it,” I told Myrle.

  She pressed her hand flat against the picture. “She looks a queen.”

  “A princess better.”

  I dropped my hand on hers and lined up our fingers. Mine were longer by an inch. “See,” I said. “She’s as pale as you.” Myrle’s eyes were puffy, a streak of wet on her cheeks. The Elliot boy, that’s what that streak was. The magazine was the only thing that made her stop whimpering long enough to sleep. The light of the washroom in that advertisement, so bright it could kill shadows. Electric, always electric, when we might as well have lived in the bottom of a hole. Myrle curled her knees to her chest waiting for a story, and I would give her one if she wanted. Back then, I would have done anything for her.

  The moon had come and gone again as we walked. The scrub in the ditches nicked us, our ankles bare enough for a bite. That fox, I wondered if it was trailing us on soft feet. But we would be fine as long as we stayed to the road and Myrle stopped her shivering. The way we made our plan, I was quick to remind her. The washing we wouldn’t have to do, and the cows left in their stalls for someone else’s buckets. Ray’s voice out of our heads and Patricia’s, Nan and her swollen fingers, pinching, poking, ordering us to break our backs. But Myrle whimpered again. “Esther,” she said. “What about . . . ?” “Hush,” I said. The pictures in the magazine, I reminded her. And Father’s hand wide as my backside, me in my britches. It was one slap for talking back. One for tracking mud in the house. Two for freeing horses, and more slaps than I could count for stealing magazines. Did Myrle remember that? My ears rung to aching. My stomach sore against Father’s knees. Father with his eyes closed, his wheezing. Nan called up the stairs, “She’s learned her lesson.” But Father was in such a state. Wild, he said of me, though he didn’t know how much.

  I ran to the cellar after every one of those lessons. The door was a heavy plank. Underneath, the wooden steps, cobwebs, and jars of what we saved from the garden, full to the brim. The ceiling was high as my head. The walls of dirt throbbed with beetles and worms. I breathed it in, that dark cool on my cheeks. Father was always quick with his slaps with me. No one else, especially Myrle, who he treated like a queen. If I closed the cellar door and pinched out the wick of my lantern, it was a cold, silent place where I could sit by myself with my knees to my chin. It was dark as dark then, the way it was those nights when I had to hold the rope from the barn to keep from losing my way to the house. If the air was warm, there wasn’t any difference between me and it. My bones and skin, they were gone as easy as pinching wicks, gone as Father wanted me to be, and I was nothing but quiet and no one could find me. At home, that dark was all I was.

  On the road, the sun was coming. The farms were spotty, the houses emptied, the barns boarded like thieves and not a noise. I laid our blanket flat under the cover of bushes. We dropped to eat. “Just a break,” I told Myrle and took out the bread, a slice of cheese I’d hidden in my bag. The bread tasted of nothing. The cheese even less. She chewed at the food in small bites, half asleep. The ground was cold but thawing. With the wind, the bushes caught our hair. It was a fine place for stopping, out of sight of the road and not a farmhouse. Only a wide trail of grass in every direction. Far off, the smell of a wood fire, but not any smoke we could see. Myrle used her bag for a pillow. An hour or two before we needed to get going, just enough to rest our feet. Already we’d walked six miles, maybe seven. We had hours of sun to make the train. Myrle was breathing easy, huddled as she was and her eyelids jumping. I knew what she dreamed. It was always the same.

  The Elliot boy. At home before we went to sleep, she’d told me every little bit. The smell of him, musky and warm, different from what she’d thought. His fingers on her back, teasing her neck. His hands so large she imagined he could hold all of her at once. The first time he helped her climb into the loft, made sure she didn’t slip. His mother was gone by then, ours too, and Lee finally home, but not by much. After the war, none of them came back, not all the way. The Elliot boy had holes in him you couldn’t really see. “Look,” he said when he showed her the scar on his belly. In the loft, he showed her the money he’d buried too. He had a tin box, and inside it, a heavy roll of bills. “I can take care of you, see?” he said. “With what they paid me at least.” That’s when he asked if Myrle wouldn’t mind lying down for a rest, and she said she didn’t. The Elliot barn wasn’t the same as ours. The loft pushed into the rafters and the boards gaped, wide enough you could spit on the cows and the hogs below fast asleep. He touched the collar of her dress, brushed her stomach between the buttons of her blouse. Bursting, he seemed, as if all he needed was at his fingertips. He touched her lower then. “Please,” he said. “You’re the prettiest little thing.” The way he asked her, she’d never been wanted so much.

  I couldn’t help it. After she went to sleep, I imagined I was the one in the loft with him instead.

  Months later, the gossip at the dinner table. “The Elliot boy’s gotten himself engaged,” Patricia said. Myrle hid her face. The prettiest, he’d told her. He must have changed his mind.

  But it was after that, after what Patricia said. The boy asked Myrle to meet him behind their old smithy. Said he was sorry. His father, he told Myrle, that’s all it was, because Old Elliot would never take a Kraut for a daughter-in-law. Still, maybe he could make it right. He stood there shivering, an arm too heavy on her shoulders. The smell of his breath was like milk from our cow. She’d worn her Easter dress for him, thinking something nice might change his mind. So he took her hand gentle like, got her up in that loft again. He got her to lie down for a rest too, but it was different this time. Only later did I see how different it was. “He never said a thing,” Myrle said. Just did what he usually did, only hard as knives and twice as fast. His mouth smothered her. His shoulder bucked her chin. And after he finished, he threw himself off as if he’d never wanted to touch her. He didn’t help her down that ladder, though her dress was ripped. Didn’t wait for her to make it out the barn door. He ran, she said. Like he was scared of himself. All the times before, she’d thought this Tom might be someone. A Tom who whispered sweet things. But that Tom was gone, and she was skin-sore and shivering, making her way through the fields alone.

  It was near dark. The grass was full of midges, hoppers too. They scared her with the way they flew up at her feet. She was lucky I saw her coming, looking after her the way I did. Her cheeks were scratched, her lips bitten. I drew her into the washhouse quick. She had more scratches on her legs, the straw splinters in her so deep I had to use pliers. But the worse of it was the bleeding, like he’d tried to split her in half. I scoured her drawers that were nearly black. Her dress I shredded for the rags. Her skin I scrubbed raw of fingertips and everything else. After Tom’s wedding, Myrle hid herself in bed in a sweat, everything that boy put in her pouring out. Sick, I told Nan. Nothing else. We kept our door closed, the lamps bright, our food untouched on plates in the hall. I tried to imagine what it was like, being wanted so much it left scars.

  After that, I knew I was going. And Myrle, she was going too.

  In the daylight now, we walked in the ditches with the scrub. I held the tail of Myrle’s coat, she had me by the wrist. We crouched in an overturned wagon to eat the last of our bread, drank from a farmer’s buckets. The water tasted like feed. Our boots fit like boxes by then, our barn coats thin. With Myrle slow as she was, by the time we made Clarksville, the sun had risen on us twice. “Where are you two going?” the man at the ticket counter asked. The stitching on his jacket spelled shell rock railroad, his ears red under his cap. He tapped his knuckles at us. But we had a pocketful of fives and tens from that tin in Elliot’s barn. Myrle had taken it herself. She’d surprised me doing that, and the boy could never say he missed it. Not after what he’d done. “All right then,” the man said. He scratched at the bald skin under his cap. “Two ticke
ts to Chicago. You girls be careful out and about.”

  We slept on the benches in the station. We slept in the train. It clumped over the tracks, slow through the boxcar end of town before speeding up. The smell of smoke from the engine, the flicker of kerosene lamps. Outside it was dark and fast and we held onto our seats, the train as loud as a tractor three times over, tearing at the rails as it went. A boy gripped the headrests as he walked the car. A woman put her stitching down, her hand on her stomach. I closed my eyes. Next I knew, the sun was coming again. It had rained the night through. The fields and farmhouses shone. My breath on the window was white. “Myrle,” I whispered, but she slumped asleep with her arms over her face. I wrote our initials on that window with my finger. MH, I wrote, and EH in larger letters. Across from us, the lady glared, and I wiped the letters off quick.

  We changed at Waterloo for the Cedar Rapids, rode through McAuburne, Shellsburg, and Bridgeton. We took the Chicago Northwestern across the state line. The Mississippi was a long stretch of water, and we were in a place called Illinois then. Later, roads broke across the fields like splinters, lines of wagons and motorcars. At the railway stations, men in suits crowded the planks, raising their hands. Soon there were sidewalks full of people with long coats and shopping bags, buildings taller than a person could count, and the pitch of horns in the streets. When at last we pulled into Chicago, it was larger than looking up had ever been. The porter tipped his hat at Myrle and we knew we’d made it.

  The night before we left, we stayed up near to morning in the kitchen to make sure of our plan. Myrle was set to get the key, and the rope was under my bed, that tin already empty and hidden back where she’d found it. When at last we climbed the stairs to our room, the sun was just rising. It was low and grand, and we watched from our window. The birds were quiet, though I felt they were restless. The fields looked black under that run of light, as if something new waited for us. There were all sorts of sights we didn’t know beyond those fields, all sorts of wonders. Myrle rested her head on my shoulder, already dreaming, and I helped her to bed. We’d have only so many hours before breakfast, only so many before Nan knocked on our door to wake us with the day of chores, before we could make our escape after night fell. When I closed my eyes, I could see the road and the brightness up ahead, the long trail that whispered to us, and I felt I was nothing and everything at once.