by Linda Byler
Hannah was watering the garden while keeping an eye on the approaching strange weather, whatever it was. She dumped water from a tin bucket, watched the parched earth soak it up greedily, and noticed the healthy green of the plants, especially the beans. All the hard work had paid off. The bean runners climbed to the top of the poles. The beans were hanging thick and healthy. The cabbage heads were firm, if small, which meant they’d have sauerkraut this winter.
If the storm kept coming toward them, they would be able to quickly harvest an amazing amount of vegetables before it hit. Jerry would certainly be impressed. She’d show him that with a bit of hard work and good management they could beat the odds.
But, what was that odor? She straightened and sniffed the air. She turned her face in every direction, taking deep breaths through her nose. Strange, that smell.
Well, likely it was a dead animal somewhere. Nip and Tuck were always dragging some putrid carcass from their burying places. Thinking no more about it, she refilled the bucket and finished her watering. She went to the house to finish the breakfast dishes.
The hens were laying well, plenty of eggs every morning, a treat she appreciated as she cooked eggs to perfection, serving them with fried mush made from the newly purchased cornmeal. She thought of the ear corn they used to buy, roast in the cook stove oven, shell and grind for their cornmeal, thus saving a dollar or so, when her mother and Manny were still here. Every penny had meant the difference between hunger and eating a meal, even if it was just cornmeal mush eaten with a pinch of salt.
The strange smell permeated the house now. Hannah tried to ignore it, finishing the dishes with a puzzled expression before stepping out on the porch to sniff the air again.
Jerry came in from the barn, his eyes questioning. Hannah met his eyes, shrugged, and shook her head.
They sat together on the porch steps, side by side, pondering the stench and the green atmosphere, as if the air contained green dust. Jerry rose uneasily, searching the sky, the waving drought-sickened grass. He paced from one end of the porch to the other.
“Sit down!” Hannah growled. “You’re making it worse than it is.”
“I’ve just never seen anything like this. Something is so weird. Strange. I don’t like the dust or the smell.”
Suddenly, he turned sharply. “Hannah, you … could it be the grasshoppers?”
She gasped, sprang to her feet, shading the strong forenoon light with the downturned palm of her hand.
Oh, please no, she thought. She’d heard tales of millions of gnawing creatures walking, plague-like, through the land and destroying everything in their path. But that was years ago. This was now the 1930s, modern times. Somehow, the automobiles, tractors, all the newer inventions did not seem like they could coexist with the grasshoppers of old.
Jerry pointed a shaking finger. “What is it?”
Hannah stood staring in disbelief. A wall of greenish-brown, yellow, and black. A moving front of writhing, gnawing insects. Spellbound, they watched their approach, a descending cloud of unreality, like a bad dream holding them captive.
“We need to close windows,” Jerry said, quietly, too calmly, as if he would be punished if he raised his voice.
“What about the barn?”
“We can’t help that. Cracks in the eaves, under the door,” Jerry replied.
“The hens? Nip and Tuck?”
Jerry leaped off the porch, raced to the barn to corral the flapping chickens. Hannah dashed after him. They shooed and yelled, Hannah screeching and flapping her apron, maudlin with fear, as the wall of grasshoppers advanced steadily.
Nip and Tuck were stuffed into their doghouse, the rubber flap closed securely with nails, before Hannah and Jerry turned and fled to the house, panting, slamming windows and doors, stuffing rags in every noticeable crack.
They heard a grinding, buzzing sound. The sound of countless jaws chewing grass, briars, weeds, each other. The dead insects rolled over and over until a sticky mass of body parts quickly putrefied in the sweltering, dust-infused sun.
Hannah felt a rising panic. She put both hands to her cheeks, her eyes wide. On they came, across the driveway, over the barn, scaling the walls like a million prehistoric creatures with oversized jaws, half flying, half leaping, grasping any available vegetation and completely mutilating it.
Hannah screamed, a long, hoarse, primal yell of fear and loathing. She screamed and screamed, stamped her feet and flapped her apron, as if her actions could put a stop to this disgusting onslaught of horrible creatures.
Quickly Jerry was at her side. “Come, Hannah. Don’t watch.” She was crying now, shaking like a leaf, begging Jerry to do something or they’d crawl in the house and over both of them. He pulled her away from the window, begging her not to watch. But she seemed powerless, mesmerized, her fingers spreading across her face, still peeping through them, wild-eyed with fear.
“Do something, Jerry. Please help me!” she screamed.
Jerry realized she was in danger of losing her sound reasoning, so completely was she consumed by her loathing of these large insects. It was a situation that was so out of her control that she felt powerless. And because she was such a fiercely determined person, he felt afraid for her.
He sat on the sofa, pulling her down, turning her face to his. He made her look at him until her eyes focused.
“Listen. Hannah, look at me. They can’t get in. We’re safe. Did you hear me? They’ll walk over the house, but they can’t get in. Hannah, look at me.”
She was wild with revulsion. She clawed at his shoulders, broke free and ran to the door, tried to yank it open. He caught her just in time, hauled her back and held her.
Finally, when the grasshoppers reached the house and began their ascent up the north side, she shuddered and fell against him, sobbing, a desperate heaving of her body, choking, begging him to hold her.
The whole house was consumed by a grinding, sawing noise, the sound of millions of raspy legs and gossamer wings and devouring, ravenous mouths. Up from the ground they walked, up the wooden side, across the roof and down the other side, through the garden, leaving not even a tendril of green.
Jerry held Hannah, her face buried in his shirt, the stifling air inside the house causing them both to perspire freely. He could see the undersides of the insects, their bulging eyes, their high, crooked green legs and oversized jaws as they tried repeatedly to scale the slippery glass of the windows, falling back to be walked on or eaten by the grasshoppers who came behind them.
They fell down the chimney into the low embers of the cook stove, dropping by the hundreds and sizzling to their death. The chimney became clogged with grasshoppers. The stove began to send out a scent of burned insects, puffing out a sickening stench.
Hannah trembled, clung to him with all her strength. Putting his handkerchief over her face, he turned her head against his chest to hold her ears shut. It was like being in a vacuum, knowing the chewing insects were like a second skin, finding any crevice available and crawling through. They sat together, hardly breathing in the unbearable stench coming from the cook stove.
Jerry wiped the sweat from his forehead, felt it sliding down his back. He took an arm away to swipe at the soaked hair on his forehead, but quickly put it back around Hannah when she cried out in distress. “I can’t. I can’t,” she kept saying over and over.
“Listen, Hannah. It’ll be over soon. They’ll stop coming eventually.” He was seriously afraid for her. So impetuous, so angry, so sure of herself. Her breakdown after spending the night in the blizzard. And now this. He was afraid this was far worse.
She had been through so much, too much. An overwhelming need to protect her, to keep her safe from more disastrous situations, rose in him. If only he could take her back to safety, to the normal weather patterns, the hills and dales of the fertile valleys he loved so much. To keep her safe among friends and relatives. To take her to church and social events.
He chasteneth whom He loveth.
Deliberately, he drew her closer, his hand stroking her trembling back. Ah yes, he well knew the ways God chastened His children. He must love Hannah to put her through so much.
For the Lord looketh on the heart.
He saw in Hannah something worth redeeming or He would not allow all of this. Is this why I love her, then?
The grinding clatter of insects continued as they huddled together in the overheated, noxious house. The fumes from the stove were overpowering. Scratching, clawing, falling back, climbing over each other, killing one another—the march of the dreaded insects moved on.
Jerry sat up straight, listened as the rasping sounds lessened, then clearly faded. No grasshoppers out the north window, which meant the end had come and was on its way out.
“Hannah.”
Her only response was a distinct tightening of her arms, her face burrowing deeper into his chest. “No, no, no, no.”
He tried to release her arms, prying with all the strength he could muster, but her grip was like a vise, a panicked death grip.
“Hannah. Hannah. Let go. It’s almost impossible to breathe in here.”
“No, no, no.”
He had to open windows, had to get away from the fumes coming from the cook stove. He wrestled her away from him with a strength born of desperation, shoving her onto the sofa where she collapsed, crying hysterically.
He tore open windows, gagged at the smell of dead grasshoppers strewn over everything, hanging body parts from window ledges, edges of siding, drooping from roof edges like cooked noodles. It was a grisly scene and there was a horrible, slimy stink where dead insects had been half-eaten by their peers.
He left Hannah and walked across the bare yard, stripped of any and all vegetation, a dry desert, a land cursed with the plague of Egypt come to visit them. He crunched across dead grasshoppers. Kicking them away, he gagged and swallowed the saliva that welled in his mouth, then gave into the nausea, leaned over, and threw up his half-digested breakfast.
First, unclog the chimney. He grabbed the wooden ladder from the tool shed and hurried to the house, setting it against the wall, climbing onto the porch roof, and from there onto the roof of the house.
Clogged, black with insects. It was a good chimney, made of creek stones and mortar. He’d simply burn them out, which is what he did, with paper and kerosene. Lighting a match on his thumbnail, he threw it in the cook stove. He was rewarded with a mighty whoosh, a roaring, crackling sound with clouds of smoke rolling out from under the stove lids.
Nothing to do about that. He’d have to help Hannah wash walls later. He swept the porch and steps, flicking his broom along the siding to rid the house of dead grasshoppers that clung to cracks in the walls.
The smoke in the kitchen was a better aroma than the sizzling insects. He heard the satisfying roar of the burning chimney, then searched for any stray insects before he went to urge Hannah to sit up and notice her surroundings, to calm down and think of it as a bad dream.
Looking back, Jerry could remember the moment when Hannah’s courage overrode her fear. Her disbelief and revulsion faded and normalcy returned. She followed him to the barn, to the creek, across the land to check on the cattle. She refused to stay alone. She asked him to stay in the house till the dishes were washed and she had tidied the house.
Often, her eyes would return to the horizon, searching for another wall of insects, her hands clenched into fists. There was no fight in her eyes, though.
Something had changed, but exactly what it was, Jerry couldn’t say. She didn’t sleep at night, but paced the floor, locked and re-locked the doors, until she passed into a stupor toward the morning hours. She begged him to stay with her, her pride and anger hidden away, erased by the memory of the crawling grasshoppers.
Finally, Jerry could not take the sleepless nights. He walked around the homestead in a fog of bewilderment, numb from lack of sleep, watching Hannah become even thinner, with a haunted look in her dark eyes.
He confronted her and told her simply that this could not continue. She lifted frightened eyes to his, like a child who knows they’ve done wrong, waiting for punishment.
“Hannah.” His voice was kind and extremely gentle. “We’re a married couple. If you don’t want to be alone at night, why don’t you sleep with me?”
“I don’t sleep. I never sleep.”
“We both hardly get our rest.”
Hannah twisted her hands in her lap, chewed on her lower lip. “I have nightmares. The minute I close my eyes I see thousands of bulging eyes…. Jerry, I never saw grasshoppers that big. They were like monsters!”
“I know, Hannah, I know. It surprises me, though. You’re so strong in the face of most things. Angry, charging through.”
Hannah picked at a loose thread on her apron, her eyes downcast. “It was Janie.” Jerry watched her face closely. “It was being lost in the storm, then Janie. It seems as if God must really have it in for me. As if He just can’t think of more bad things to send my way. I know I’m a horrible person.”
“No, you’re not.”
“You know I am. It’s my father’s fault. He brought me out here.”
“Your father is dead, Hannah.”
“So?”
“Your father did the best he could.”
“No, he didn’t. He was crazy.”
“Forgiveness never comes easy. I know. And yes, he did put his family through more than most men would deem right. But it’s done now, it’s over. Your past is like water under a bridge. It’s gone. Irretrievable. You’ll never be able to change one moment of all that has happened. But you can change your remembering and the way you choose to cling to past wrongs. Let it go, Hannah.”
For one second he thought she would soften, her eyes turning liquid with the thought of taking his advice. To try.
And then she sniffed, straightened her back, sat ramrod straight, and turned her head to gaze out of the window, her eyes seeing nothing. “I hate Lancaster County, you know.”
“No, you don’t. You are deeply ashamed of your past, to this day. Folks forget. They likely barely remember exactly what occurred, and if they do remember, it’s bathed in the rosy light of forgiveness, which, you know, fixes a lot of bad memories.”
Unconvinced, Hannah pouted.
At bedtime, she spent a long time in the bathroom, running water at regular intervals, opening and closing drawers. He heard her brush her teeth until she surely must have nearly brushed all the enamel off! He waited.
Finally, she emerged, a long flannel nightgown draped to the floor and covering her body like a heavy curtain. Her arms were crossed and one hand went to hold onto the button at her throat, scraping it nervously as if to reassure herself that it was still there and closed firmly.
“I’ll sleep with you.”
Jerry blinked. His mouth went dry. Was this all there was to it, then? Those four words, stating her necessity, spoken in her exhausted, gravelly voice, surrounded by the ravaged, destroyed land.
She turned, like a tired ghost of herself, and walked into his bedroom.
Soundlessly, Jerry lifted himself from the bed, careful, quiet. In the light of dawn, she lay on her side, her dark hair spread across the white pillow, her heavy lashes like crescents on her pale cheeks, her breath coming in soft, slow puffs, a hand tucked beneath her cheek. He could have watched her all day.
He gathered up his clothes, tiptoed out, and silently entered the bathroom, checking his face in the mirror to see if his appearance had changed overnight. He blinked. Quick tears sprang to his eyes.
Overcome by emotion, he braced himself with the palms of his hands on the edge of the sink as his head sank to his chest. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to keep the tears at bay. But in the end, he gave up and sobbed, praising God in a language that came from his heart, a reward for his patience, his bitter cup of self-denial.
So, God was right all along. His love for Hannah was real and not just infatuation or lust, not just a challenge, th
e winning of her a triumph, a victory. His heart sang praises as his spirits soared. He could live in this harsh land for the rest of his days with Hannah by his side, in spite of having so many misgivings. He would truly give his life for her, give up his own idea of how and where they should make a home. He would love her to the end of his days.
After the barn chores were finished, Jerry entered the house by the back door, removed his shoes, and washed up carefully. The house was strangely quiet, so he made very little noise.
The kitchen was empty, the cook stove cold. He tiptoed to the bedroom door but didn’t have the heart to tap on it as he heard soft snores, like those of a sleeping child. Smiling to himself, he decided to forego breakfast rather than wake her. He knew he’d clatter around with the cook stove top and the frying pan, so he let himself out into the washhouse, put on his shoes, and went to the barn and sat.
He simply sat on a sawhorse, his legs stretched out in front of him, his arms crossed, and grinned. He didn’t think of anything, and yet he thought of everything. His mind was filled with the wonder of Hannah. His wife.
Their future was in her hands. He was willing to stay. He could sacrifice everything, the companionship of friends and relatives, the ability to become financially successful, the privilege of attending his beloved church services with the brethren, all of it. He could be happy wherever Hannah was.
He went to the door, leaned an elbow on the doorjamb, and gazed at the devastated land. He shook his head in disbelief. Like a desert it was. Nothing remained. Not a stub of grass. Nothing. The garden was visible only by indentations where plants and rows had been. He thought of the potatoes.
They’d need rain before any form of vegetation would grow. The swarm of grasshoppers had been a few miles wide, roughly estimated, so the Jenkinses likely knew nothing of it yet.
The water tank had been choked with grasshoppers, turning the entire metal container into a slimy, tepid heap of stinking bodies. He’d merely kicked the whole thing over and turned away, unable to tolerate the smell of the half-dead, drowned, mutilated bodies of these oversized creatures.
