by Jenna Blum
Martha said, "What?" almost dreamily, caught up in something, and when she turned toward him, the bare shape of her face in the night took on the look of a girl about twelve years old, a child so innocent and absolutely devoid of guile that he thought suddenly she was too young to even know what he was asking of her, what he meant to ask of her, and that he ought to let her grow up first, without a man's hands, his hands, despoiling her. But then she smiled and said, "What?" again, and leaned into him and kissed him on the mouth. The child had gone out of her face, and she was Martha whom he loved, and he would have taken her down on the ground right then if it had been possible to do it and still go on living with himself.
He said huskily, "I want to ask you if you'd think about marrying me."
So there it was. Her eyes widened but she wasn't surprised. She had expected that Henry might want to marry her, and for weeks had gone over and over her answer in her mind. She said slowly, gravely, "I would think about it," which he might have taken as a good start except she had begun to frown, looking at him, and he thought he knew what was coming next, and his heart started beating loudly in his ears. But it was just that she had made up her mind to say several things if Henry proposed, and her own heart was thudding so loudly it took her a minute, standing there frowning, to get them lined up so she could remember and say them all.
"I'd want you to know, first, that I would still want to go on breaking horses and working outside," she said. She raised her eyebrows, half-questioning him, but then went on with the rest quickly before he could begin to answer. "So I guess I'd want somebody else hired in to do the housework and the cooking, or else I guess you would have to get used to living with things being dirty, and eating sandwiches. And when I'm not working with horses I'd want to help you and work with the cows; that's something I could learn to do, and I'd want to. And when there are children, they'd have to get used to riding on the front of the saddle like Young Karl, because I wouldn't want to stay in the house like women usually do." Then, because the last thing was the hardest for her to say, she began to blush, which she thought he couldn't see in the darkness, and the only reason she didn't drop her eyes from him was because he was almost invisible to her against the black river. She said, her voice beginning to shake, "And I wouldn't want to have as many babies as my mother had, six children in six years." She was twenty years old. She didn't have any idea how to keep from having a child every year except by leaving her husband alone in his bed, and she thought that was what she was saying to him. She took a breath, to give herself a moment more to think. Her big mouth pursed slightly. "I don't know if you would mind having a wife like that," she said, and just for a moment she was a child again, her voice catching on the last words.
He couldn't have been more astonished. He stared at her and had to think what to say. There wasn't any way in the world he could talk to her about condoms. Finally he said, "You know I'm just a hired hand and I don't know as I'll ever be able to have a house or land that's mine, or afford my own hired help." He tried to smile. "I don't know if you'd mind having a husband like that."
She seemed not to know what he was getting at and went on looking at him and frowning. They were standing a little apart, not touching—she had dropped his hand when he first asked her about marriage—and she was standing on the high ground, taller even than usual, and looking down on him a bit. He thought some more and finally he said, "I guess if we can't afford to hire help there's other ways around it. I'm already used to doing for myself, washing and cleaning. I can make eggs and pancakes, so I guess we wouldn't always have to eat sandwiches."
Then she understood what he was saying and she tried to hide a smile, as if she was twelve again and shy, but when he reached for her hand she came up to him and pressed herself to him and wanted him to kiss her, and he did.
In those days it wasn't legal to ship condoms across state lines, and Henry didn't know if it was legal to buy and sell them in Elwha County. He didn't know where that girl at the courthouse had gotten her French darlings. He wondered if Chuck might know, or Emil Thiede.
28
PATRIOTISM RAN WILD in those days, like a plague of fever. People clamored for war protesters to be kicked out of the country, and laws aimed at German spies were used to send conscientious objectors to jail, and pacifist ministers, journalists who wrote antiwar editorials, soldiers who complained of bad conditions in the army, teachers who spoke out in favor of German literature.
Elwha County had a Home Guard without much to guard, so after the barn at Stanley's Camp burned down, members of the Guard went around to three or four German settlers in that part of the valley and turned over their furniture looking for a reason to say they'd set the fire. One thing led to another and one of the farmhouses got burned down and a man named Kurt Schweiger was stabbed with a guardsman's sword, which didn't kill him, but after he came out of the hospital he and his family packed up and moved out of the valley.
Early in April, about a week after Kurt Schweiger was stabbed, Millard Rankin, the chairman of the Liberty Bond committee and also a volunteer with the Home Guard, stopped by the Thiede place with a Kodak box camera and walked around the yard taking pictures of the house and the barns and the horses standing in the pasture. Irene watched him for a few minutes from the kitchen window and then went out and asked him what he was doing and he gave her a high-handed explanation—that he planned to use the pictures at the next patriotic meeting to show folks how preposterous it was that the well-off Thiedes had purchased only two hundred dollars in Liberty Bonds. She gave Millard a check for two hundred more, which she knew was giving in to extortion, and when Emil got home he said in a fury that he would go to the bank in the morning and stop the check; then he stormed out to the barn without touching his supper.
Irene put Young Karl to bed and went into the room that had been Old Karl's, which she now used for sewing, and she sewed a while, piecing the quilt she had begun from scraps of her father-in-law's shirts, the ones too worn out to be worth mending for her husband to wear. Quite a bit later Emil came into the house, came back to the bedroom where she was sewing and stood in the doorway behind her. She didn't think she would be able to stop herself from crying if she turned to look at him, so she went on sewing, and finally he said, "It won't kill us to have four hundred dollars in bonds."
She inhaled sharply and said, "We had a good calf crop," as if he had disputed it, and as if that was the only point that mattered.
Emil watched her another minute. "It's all right, honey," he said quietly. "Come on out and warm me up some supper." And then he came across the room and put his hands on her shoulders and waited until she could quit her crying.
Neither of them said anything about Kurt Schweiger being stabbed. Neither of them knew if Millard Rankin's visit had anything to do with the fire at Stanley's Camp—the Home Guard feeling its oats—or if the Liberty Bond committee had just decided to squeeze a few more dollars out of some of the old-time ranchers. But they figured they knew which it was.
29
THE WAR HAD MADE cloth and buttons scarce and high-priced, so Louise Bliss and the women in her sewing group got together and made Martha's wedding trousseau from several cast-off dresses collected from their own closets. They picked out the stitches and resewed the bodices and sleeves to fit Martha and to resemble styles they had seen advertised in the Ladies Home Journal, and in two or three days put together the pieces that would make it possible for Martha to live as a married woman: a muslin nightgown trimmed with ribbon, a brown suit that would do for the wedding and the wedding trip, and two housedresses, one a blue-and-white check and one a pale green with a cream-colored bodice. Louise doubted Martha would wear either of the dresses, but felt she should have them anyway.
Late in April, after the roundup and branding was finished on the ranches and after the cast had come off Martha Lessen's arm, Henry and Martha were married in the Woodruffs' big log living room. They spent their wedding night in the foreman's house on
the Split Rock Ranch, and the next day Henry took her on the train over to Haines in the Baker Valley, where his mother and stepfather and his two sisters lived.
Martha and Henry took the spur line up to Pendleton and changed trains there. They had a couple of hours between trains and the weather was soft, the way it can be in April, and not raining, and Martha wanted to see her brothers, the younger ones still at home, so they walked from the station out to her dad's place, which was a fair walk.
Her dad when he came to the door looked pretty surprised to see her, and he shook Henry's hand and said, "Jesus Christ, I never figured this. I figured her for an old maid."
Martha turned red, but Henry just said in a flat way, "You figured wrong."
Martha's mother heard them talking and came in from the kitchen, wiping her hands. She said, "Hello, Martha," and after she heard that Henry and Martha were married she asked when, and they told her just the day before and that this was their wedding trip, and she said, "Well, all right," and nodded, but that was all, and then she went back into the kitchen.
They didn't stay long—they had that long walk to get back to catch the train—and it turned out two of her brothers were away, digging irrigation ditches for a wheat ranch over in the Stanfield Project. But they went out to the barn where Mike, who was the youngest, was repairing an old drill. Martha and her brothers had grown up in a house where people didn't touch, so when Mike lifted his head and saw her there, they both just stood and looked at each other, smiling. He had grown about half a foot since she'd seen him, or it appeared that way to her.
"Hey, Martha."
"Hey, Mike." Her hand was inside the bend of Henry's elbow. "This is Henry."
Henry went over and shook Mike's hand as if they were two men—well, Mike was almost a man, fourteen, nearly fifteen. He peered at Henry and seemed about to ask him something but then he looked at Martha and asked it. "Is he your husband?"
Martha started to blush. "Yes," she said.
They visited a few minutes, talking about horses more than anything else, and when they left, Mike walked with them as far as the lane. He said, "I sure wish Bert and Stevie were here. They're working over in Stanfield."
"I know, Dad told me. When you see them, you tell them how much I miss you all." She couldn't stop from feeling teary. "Maybe you could all come down to see me in Elwha County. You could think about moving down there. There's plenty of work."
"Oh yeah?" He ducked his head, casting a look back toward the house. "I don't know. Dad's pretty stove up." He touched the sleeve of Martha's suit and said, "I'm not used to seeing you in a skirt," and they didn't talk any more about the boys moving down to the valley.
Haines was right on the Union Pacific line, a shipping point for grain and livestock grown in the south part of Union County; Ernest Bailey—that was Henry's stepfather's name—worked as a switchman for the railroad yard there. He was a short, wiry-built man who reminded Martha slightly of Orie's friend Ray Buford, except for being about sixty years old. Henry's mother was short too and very stout, her bosom a great shelf above a loosely tied corset. She had a ruddy face and a brow bone without much in the way of eyebrows, which was where Henry had come by that look. The two girls, Henry's sisters, had both been married quickly before their husbands shipped over to France, and they had come home to live until the war should end. They looked like their dad, who was Ernest Bailey: they were short and thin and had his sand-colored hair.
They were all easy for Martha to like, although she was uncomfortable with how much Mrs. Bailey and the girls enjoyed hugging her, and kissing her on her forehead or cheeks. They hugged and kissed Henry too, but she didn't mind that so much; she liked watching them together, their easy affection with one another, which didn't make her feel like an outsider but like someone watching a moving picture and caught up in the story. Henry and Jim's father had died when the two boys were four and six, so Ernest Bailey was pretty much the only father Henry remembered. Sometimes Martha looked over and caught Mr. Bailey looking at his wife and his daughters and his stepson with a bemused, charmed smile, and tears standing in his eyes. The whole family was sentimental, every one of them. Henry hadn't been able to hold back a few tears when he spoke his vows at their wedding, and now Martha saw where that came from.
On the fireplace mantelpiece was a large picture in an ornate cardboard frame, a picture that must have been taken several years back, the two girls and Henry and his brother, Jim, standing behind Mr. and Mrs. Bailey, who were sitting together on an upholstered bench. If she had met him in the street, a stranger, Martha felt she would have known Jim for Henry's brother, they were that much alike, and she had a sudden apprehension of his loss, and the family's loss. In the photograph, all their faces were shining with the seriousness of the moment.
Jane moved her things into her sister Susan's bedroom so there would be a bed for Henry and Martha to sleep in, and sometime after midnight they all settled down to try to sleep. Martha thought Henry would turn his back to her while she undressed and got into the muslin gown—he had done that on their wedding night—but he sat down on the edge of the bed and began unbuttoning his shirt and didn't look away.
"Your parents are just the other side of this wall," she whispered to him, and he smiled and whispered back, "They can't see through the wall."
He took off the rest of his outer clothes while Martha slowly undid some of her buttons, and he folded his clothes neatly and put them down in their suitcase, and then Martha looked away, blushing, while he stepped out of his knit cotton underdrawers and put on the nightshirt he had bought for the wedding trip. She thought he might get into the bed then and finally turn his back to her, but he sat again on the edge of the bed and waited, his eyes on her, while she went on undressing slowly. The light in the room was dim—they had brought in just a candle—but when she got down to her underthings she began to blush fiercely. From where he sat on the bed, Henry reached out his hand and caught one of her hands and drew her slowly to him. He made a long low sound like a deep sigh and slowly lifted up her undershirt and helped her out of it, and then her under-drawers. When she was entirely naked, her skin flaming, he stood up and put his hands at her waist and whispered into her ear, "I never have seen anything prettier." But he was as shy as Martha about anything his parents and his sisters might hear, all of them being so close by in the small house—he could hear them talking and moving about, squeaking the bedsprings, in the other rooms; he knew they would hear any sound he and Martha made. And he was afraid if he began touching his wife—his wife!—there wouldn't be any stopping. So he helped her on with the muslin gown and then blew out the candle and they lay down on the bed together in the darkness, their legs and arms enfolded; and after a while their hearts quit racing.
There had been a moment, a bright sharp moment as they stood before the preacher in the Woodruffs' front room making their wedding promises, when Martha thought suddenly of Ruth and Tom Kandel—a flash of insight and of fear—that in marrying Henry she was throwing herself open to the very thing she had seen in Ruth's face that terrible morning when Tom was in so much pain, the morning they had waited together for the doctor to come. It was a glimpse of the hard truth that loving someone meant living every moment with the knowledge he might die—die in a horrible way—and leave you alone. But Martha was barely twenty years old and this was not something she could hold in her mind for very long. Lying in the darkness with the living heat and weight of her new husband clasped against her breast, she imagined they would go on being happy and young forever.
30
IN THAT SAME MONTH, April of 1918, the month Irene Thiede bought more bonds to keep the Home Guard from tarring and feathering Emil or setting fire to their house or their barn, another kind of fever was set to run through the country. Clyde Boyd, in a letter to his young son, Joe, and his father, W.G., wrote that an influenza was going through the camps in Kansas where he was teaching men to string telephone line; and Will Wright, in a letter to Lizzie, w
rote that the flu was going through the men on the front lines, brought over with the last shipload of soldiers from the States.
Over the next months and into the summer of that year, more than half a million people all over the country died of flu, and it killed some people in Elwha County: Alfred Logerwell was one, and also Pearl Bayard. But it fell out that most of the people Martha knew, people who were her friends and her family, made it through the flu epidemic and the war alive. Both of Henry's brothers-in-law and even Will Wright came home more or less unharmed, although more than a hundred thousand American boys died over there from battle and disease and one of them was Roger Newbry, the friend who had joined up with Will.
Of the four million horses sent over to that war, a million died outright, and of the three million still alive when the end was reached, only a handful made it home alive, horses written up in the newspapers—this or that one brought home by a captain or a colonel whose life had been saved by his horse. After the armistice, with so many farms and fields racked by years of bombs and mustard gas, the three million horses who had survived were butchered for meat to feed all the hungry refugees, something the newspapers failed to mention. Martha wouldn't learn of it until she was a woman of fifty sitting in her living room reading Life magazine, dropping the magazine into her lap with a helpless cry.
After the war the spirit of ruthless intolerance and repression that had caused so much trouble in those years carried right over into the peace. In the first months after the war ended, the Ku Klux Klan placed an advertisement in the Elwha Valley Times-Gazette calling for new members—"Patriots Who Hold This Country Dear"—to conceal their identities in robes and hoods and march from the Shelby meeting hall to the fairgrounds for a public initiation. Not a single Negro person was living in Elwha County in those days, and the Chinese were all in Grant County or Baker County working the mines, and the Indians were penned up in other parts of the state; but there was a Jewish family running a dry-goods store in Shelby and some Basques and Mexicans down in Owl Creek Canyon and plenty of Catholics of all stripes; and that was where the local Klan planned to focus its attention. That, and patriotic vigilance to keep the Negroes and Chinese and Indians and various undesirable immigrants from moving in and overrunning the valley.
