“Yale? What are those? What are you…” Katherine went to Yale and relieved her of the stack, marveling at the sight of the yellowed envelopes mixed with blaze white stationary, tied with pink ribbon. “Where did you get these?”
Yale’s eyes grew wide and her shoulders rose and fell in at the same time as though she wanted to disappear inside herself. Katherine laid her hand on Yale’s arm.
“It’s all right. You didn’t do anything wrong.” Katherine looked at her mother then back to Yale before paging through the envelopes. Most were from Howard Templeton, some dated as early as 1888 and some as late as 1905. There was a smattering from Tommy, return addresses from sites the world over. Then there were a few from Katherine’s father—what must have been love letters between Jeanie and Frank, Katherine assumed.
“Mama said to. She needed them. She reads them every night. They’re her salvation she said. No one else remembers. No one else cares.”
Katherine took the books from Yale. The two Jeanie had written in 1885 as well as a collection of her newspaper columns.
“She wanted these?”
Yale nodded.
“But why, she can’t even sit up to read.”
“I read them to her.” Yale’s posture unfolded as she spoke the words.
“You can read?” Katherine shook her head, searching Yale’s face for familiarity two sisters should have shared. She saw nothing, but felt it, the love, the sudden understanding that this woman, even with her limited mental ability knew things about her family that Katherine didn’t. She was ashamed then angered that her mother had put Katherine in the position of having to be a less than perfect daughter and sister.
“Well then. Mother needs you, so go on and read. Give her the comfort she requires.”
Yale nodded and settled into the chair beside Jeanie’s bed. She held Jeanie’s hand, kissed it, and told her how much she loved her. Jeanie stirred at Yale’s voice. Next, Yale launched into the day’s events as though Jeanie weren’t comatose, was able to carry on her end of a conversation. Katherine’s stomach caved in on itself as though she’d been struck with a flour sack.
Seeing Yale so fully intertwined with Jeanie as Katherine hadn’t been in recent memory, sickened her. The sight of the two of them was so jarring that in Katherine’s mind, a shift occurred. Her heart was impassable, she thought, but her mind, was another matter. She suddenly wanted to understand, wanted to let her mother know she at least tried to make sense of it all.
Jeanie’s head rolled side to side as she clung to Yale’s hand. “Yale,” Jeanie’s voice was thin. “Yale, I’m so sorry for your life. Where are you? Where did I leave you? Why can’t I find you?”
Katherine stood immobilized. She watched Yale caress her mother’s hair, calming her. What was her mother talking about? When was Yale lost? Was Jeanie remembering the other night when Yale got drunk at the bar? Katherine decided it was simply a mix of morphine and the steady fall into death that were confusing her mother.
She lingered there, watching Yale read the letters, remembering a time when she’d been the one to read letters to her mother, when her mother pored over them as though they held sacred answers to her dire circumstances. And Katherine knew. She had something to discover before it was too late and with that thought, she could finally move. The answers were in the letters. Not the ones Yale was reading. The answers were in the letters Jeanie had attempted to burn, the letters tucked away in the trunk in the attic, the one that hadn’t been opened since 1888. That hideous year on the prairie.
Chapter 10
1887
Dakota Territory
The fire raped and exposed the prairie, land that then consumed baby Anzhela. But interspersed in the burnt, barren plains, almost immediately, certain sections of the land that had been narrowly missed or not completely ravaged, birthed vibrant grasses and sunflowers that shot from the ground like earth-bound suns.
The Zurchenkos responded much like the earth. Like prairie plants, it was as though the family was made to survive such horrors. They tucked their charred emotions away in self-defense, ignored the reality that their daughter and sister was dead and that Katherine and Aleksey had been part of that terrible day, and simply started to bloom again.
They took Tommy and Katherine under their plowing tutelage, having them spend each day there, attempting to coax the land into yielding crops once again. Though they didn’t have much hope for replanting the crops that had burned, they still turned the land as Nikolai had seen crops grow quickly when the right luck visited them in years past. Mostly the farmers focused on the gardens and crops that had survived the fire, tending them like newborn babies fresh from the womb.
James made trips to Yankton with Templeton to secure supplies and plan for Templeton’s new home, discussing science and weather, making Jeanie sad that Frank seemed to have little connection to the prairie or her family. What was most sad was that he didn’t seem to care or notice that it was so.
Just as the fire ripped open the land, exposing its guts and daring it to come back to its full strength, Jeanie felt the same challenge had been issued to her. She acquiesced to prairie life, allowing her children to traipse over the land from homestead to homestead, running errands, collecting cow chips on the way back from the Zurchenko’s each day to be used as fuel.
Every chance she had, she sewed and tried to find the loving plains of her heart where her marriage used to live. Frank was moderately helpful to the other men, but he spent most of his time pretending to carve useful furniture as Templeton brought some wood back on loan.
The antipathy that strangled Jeanie in regard to Frank’s laziness was numbing at times. The resentment would burst up, appearing at the sight of him lazing about, long after Jeanie and the children had done their chores. Then one day as the bitterness sat there inside Jeanie it became clear that it wasn’t new to their prairie life. She recognized it as an emotional stowaway, only presenting itself when forced, that it had been a part of their marriage for some time.
It was simply that in Des Moines, she could cover up for any of his shortcomings, without even noticing she was doing it. She compensated for anything and everything that wasn’t quite right. It was who she was. Or who she’d been, rather, as there was no time or materials for compensating for others on the prairie. She supposed it was only the depth of the resentment that still surprised her, the way she tried to charm it away, with sweet love speeches in his ear here and there. But nothing worked for either of them.
There in the dugout, she tried to counteract her anger by spending late hours when acid-stomach wakened her, culling the letters she’d written to Frank, and him to her, while they courted at the ripe age of fifteen. In her own letters, she tried to recognize the love that was there on the paper, to let it leap from the pages or pull her in, bringing back the love she once risked her entire life for. She shook the letters, wanting so badly to love Frank again, to believe in him as she had before.
Tommy, who worked like an ox, but seemed to have the same shallow reflection processes, barely noticed Jeanie reading her own letters as though they were written by Shakespeare or Beecher or any of the authors she once pored over. But Katherine and James noticed. Katherine often sat beside Jeanie reading along, smiling as her mother did, at the words. Jeanie would often fold a letter quickly, hiding portions of it from her daughter. Katherine would beg for more.
But James would sit, by the door, writing in his journal, or studying the science books he and Templeton had borrowed from a library in a town further east, watching Jeanie, not pushing for answers to his silent questions regarding Jeanie’s study of her writings.
It was through the reading of these letters that Jeanie found some peace, that she was able to stave off the utter dread that her life had become like a massive, elephantine plain of drudgery that she had to traverse every single day. Once in a while she’d think of Lutie. Jeanie had also known a divorced woman in Des Moines and while Jeanie’d thought and said h
orrid things about the divorcee in the past, there was a part of Jeanie that envied the freer position, that the divorcee’s time was her own and waiting on a man in front of her own needs was not a part of that life.
But, that divorcee woman had money, loads of it, and as Jeanie recognized, money changed everything. Sitting there in the dank, suffocating dugout, Jeanie felt her innards transforming, her mind entertaining thoughts that she had no businesses inviting.
Nothing Frank had ever done was grounds for divorce. Jeanie actually couldn’t call up any circumstances that warranted it, but yet, there it was. The word swirled around her mouth. She let it dance in her head, create visions of independence in her heart, she knew at the end of things, she’d view a divorce as scathing failure, one that she wasn’t sure she could overcome even if she still had her former riches and standing.
In her mind, the only way to have an independent life outside of divorce would have been to have never married in the first place. And it was that thought that always ended her inner divorce machinations and left her with an ever growing sense of loss and disappointment that in a world where there were few choices, she’d had the ability to make some, and she may have chosen wrong.
In Des Moines, money had rarely been directly discussed. They, of a certain social order, understood who had what money and holdings and though often those matters were discussed behind one’s back, one never sat in the parlor with mixed company discussing finances and how they impacted daily life.
But, as the Hunts, Zurchenkos, Moores, Templeton, and Arthurs sat down to dinner the day Templeton returned from Yankton, wagon nearly buckling with wood, food-stuffs and new clothing, the lot of them in fact disclosed the exact amount of money each of them had and or was willing to contribute to making their stay on the prairie profitable and worth the effort of pioneering.
Though no one asked directly, Templeton revealed he’d buried, behind his barn, a sum of money that was the stash that allowed him to buy more lumber in Yankton for a new frame house. He wrote a personal note to Frank, lending the amount it would cost for materials and labor to rebuild the commissions for furniture that had perished in the fire as well as to furnish Templeton’s home, at least with a bedstead and lounge.
The information relating to Templeton’s hidden wealth caused Lutie to flush and wiggle in between her sister and Templeton, to begin the process of flirtation. This satisfied Jeanie as she thought this would funnel any attention Lutie rained on her Frank onto Templeton instead.
But, it also galled Jeanie that Lutie so overtly shoved her own sister from Templeton’s side, clearly staking her claim, without any thought for the dear Ruthie. Not that Templeton appeared to hold any interest for Ruthie beyond passing gentlemanly politeness, but still, if Lutie gave the pair some room, who knew what might develop?
Jeanie resisted the urge to shower the same amount of pity on Ruthie as her sister drizzled admiration over Frank. Jeanie despised her inclination to weigh attractiveness above all else for it was not as though she were a classic beauty herself.
Ruthie was quite gifted in the domestic arenas. She was strong, quiet, capable, smart and underneath her pocked skin, was the same stunning beauty of her sister. Ruthie just needed the right man to take notice of what lay slightly below the surface. Jeanie saw bits of her former self in Ruthie—the way she worked in ways that Jeanie could only think were attempts to lure Templeton into courting her.
But as happens when any woman feels her insecurities surface, Ruthie must have experienced just that when Lutie weaseled in between her and Templeton. Ruthie jumped to her feet, face crimson, eyes a bit wild as she ordered Lutie to bring some water, to stir the stew, to make herself useful in any manner of way that must have flashed to mind.
Jeanie stood and joined Ruthie by the fire where she cranked the spoon around the vat of stew as though it were the perpetrator of the slight instead of Lutie.
“Ruthie,” Jeanie put her hand on Ruthie’s arm.
Ruthie shrugged it off. She glared at Jeanie who backed off.
“I’m sorry. I was just trying to tell you what a wonderful stew you’ve made. That—”
“Oh, please, what does it matter? I’m a quilt-stitch from packing up and heading out of this hell on earth.”
Jeanie looked around to see if anyone else heard Ruthie’s outburst. The rest of them were chatting and greeting Greta as she came across the land, holding Anna’s hand. Jeanie didn’t want to cut Ruthie off in her time of need—some people lashed out when they were threatened and they could be diffused with a little tenderness and Jeanie felt protective of Ruthie, inclined to mother her a bit. But, Greta hadn’t left her house in days, even though when Jeanie visited, she seemed overly cheerful, her face frozen in a grimacy smile, swearing she was fine, almost as though she couldn’t remember what had happened to Anzhela.
And here she was, for the first time appearing her normal self, with the plain expression that only hinted at what was happening in her head rather than a crazy mask of grief that looked side-showish more than real. Jeanie started toward Greta but Ruthie was already mid-sentence.
“Really, you have everything Jeanie Arthur, and I don’t need pity or mothering or—”
Jeanie shook her head distracted by Greta, not willing to take the brunt of Ruthie’s misplaced anger.
“You know, life is what you make it, Ruthie. You’re a good woman, I can see that. And I think proving up your homestead is admirable, but maybe it’s just too much for two women to handle on their own. Maybe the land wouldn’t be your own if you were married, but you’d share in its riches and the riches of a husband’s love.”
Ruthie stopped stirring and smirked at Jeanie.
“You believe that line of you know what?”
“Of course, Ruthie, of course I do.”
And with that intrusion into Jeanie’s personal thoughts, she turned and stalked away. She was halfway to Greta when she realized Ruthie may not have been asking about herself. Jeanie turned back to Ruthie who was watching her. Jeanie lifted her hand in a wave and wondered if she did believe all that manure that surged from her mouth like lava from a great volcano. Jeanie rushed to Greta telling herself that it would be another long night with the love letters of her past.
Over a dinner of stew, oatcakes and coffee—real coffee not the seedy substitute they’d been forced to make until Templeton rose out of the land like a dream—the Darlington Township cooperative discussed their needs. They determined who could meet them and whether to address other families in the township who might have something to offer and needs to be met.
The Zurchenkos inquired with their immediate neighbors (those not part of their cooperative) and some had already packed up to leave while others were unwilling to risk sharing their plenty. So, the Arthurs, Hunts, Templeton, Moores, and Zurchenkos agreed to proceed in the manner they’d started.
The Zurchenkos would shoulder the bulk of re-plowing and replanting late summer corn and winter wheat as all they could do was take the chance that they would get 85 days for the corn in before the frost came. Even if the crop yielded a modicum of corn it would help the group throughout the winter.
Ruthie agreed to teach the children once the weather settled between the harvest and when it became too cold to venture out on a given day. Ruthie would tend her garden with Lutie’s assistance as would Abby Hunt. Jeanie’s tailoring would rest until Templeton’s home was rebuilt as she and Mr. Hunt would assist him in rebuilding.
The next day all the men would frame Templeton’s new home then disperse to do their other work while Jeanie and James assisted in lathing the home. Frank would turn back to his furniture construction as soon as the wood was up.
Jeanie couldn’t stop thinking of the cooperative, the dangerousness of it—knowing Abby was an opium eater, how reliable could she be? Mr. Hunt and his pear-shaped body was nearly useless beyond discussion of books and art, and the Moores were only semi-solidly invested as half of their family was taking more than s
he gave.
And Greta, the strongest of them all it seems was a bit too strong in the shadow of the loss of her daughter. Jeanie wondered if she was as all right as she projected, taking on her own share of plowing and planting as though her daughter never existed let alone spent her entire life with her little arms laced around Greta’s neck.
Everyone but Templeton departed soon after dinner and the evening slowed to a lumbering pace brought on by oppressive heat and humidity that left them all tempted to drink their own sweat as it puddled and dripped from ears and noses and snaked down faces.
Jeanie felt the heat more so. Her body churned extra heat to grow the baby inside and by night, she couldn’t wait to strip down to her petticoat and douse herself, cleansing her private areas as best she could. She tried to catch a whiff of her odor hoping that the fact that she couldn’t smell herself anymore meant that she didn’t smell at all.
As Frank and Templeton finished watering the horses, Templeton uncovered a special treat in his wagon. A surprise that James, Frank and he carried to the dugout. Jeanie had dried the final tin cup and turned to see the three of them grinning as though they’d created land and sea themselves.
“A tub?” Jeanie said. She covered her mouth. “Of all things…“
“Well,” Templeton said. “We need it to mix the plaster for the lathe, but before we foul the tub with the earthy mud, I thought… I mean, James had said you’d been yearning for a well, I’m sorry if this is, I feel mighty impolite now that we’re standing here like this.”
“I told him not to,” Frank mumbled. “Don’t want no one going to trouble.”
Jeanie ran her hand over the cool side of the tub. Of course he didn’t because he wouldn’t, Jeanie thought. She ignored Frank’s grammar that had begun to lose its luster with the loss of the rest of his prairie manners. He crossed his arms and appeared bored— whistling at the ceiling—to have to attend to his wife in such a way.
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