by Linda Byler
They’d dried in the hot sun and crunched underfoot like cornflakes. He swallowed and shuddered. One of the worst experiences of his life, most certainly. Jerry wondered at the bullheadedness of that King Pharaoh in the Old Testament. That guy sure was stubborn. So many plagues, one right after another, and still he clung to his own way and kept God’s children captive. He tried to imagine a sea of frogs coming hopping across the prairie, followed by a spell of darkness unlike anything anyone had ever seen. And even that wasn’t the end of it. Jerry could not imagine what the children of Israel had endured before they could enter the Promised Land, and even then, things had never been perfect.
As they would not be with Hannah. He smiled, remembering. The way she described people, the narrow-minded suspicion with which she viewed every person she was not acquainted with. He laughed outright, thinking of the time they met Simon and Drucilla Rutgers in town. Simon was a good fellow, amiable, friendly to a fault. He ran a successful (for that area) cattle operation west of Pine. Simon was a short, wiry guy with a face like a good bulldog, sporting the unusual habit of spitting when he spoke.
Hannah hadn’t been in his presence longer than a few seconds before she started glaring at him. She’d stepped back, crossed her arms, and watched in fascination as he sprayed spittle enthusiastically. Later, seated beside Jerry on the spring wagon, she’d started in immediately.
“What’s wrong with him? He needs to wear a bib. Or carry a towel in his belt. Honestly, that face. He looks like he ran full tilt into the side of his barn.”
Jerry’s shoulders began to shake, even now. His nose burned and tears rose to the surface, again. He could never scold her. It was simply too funny. Hannah did not like people, which, of course, was the biggest reason she loved the plains so. Ach, my Hannah.
It was all part of who she was, and he loved even that about her, no matter if it was a fault, a shortcoming. He loved her for being herself, for hiding nothing in the exalted name of pride, the way most folks did. His Hannah didn’t care one little bit what people thought of her. She said and did what suited her at the time.
The sun rose higher in the sky and the bare land glared like the balding head of an old, old man.
CHAPTER 13
SARAH SAT IN THE KITCHEN OF THE STONE FARMHOUSE IN LANCASter County. She was alone, the old clock ticking rapidly from the high shelf above her, the spigot dripping slowly into the white, porcelain sink. She’d have to get her father to look at it.
She read and re-read Hannah’s letter. It was a long one, which was unusual. Her letters normally consisted of a few paragraphs, mostly about the weather and nothing much of interest. She read it slowly, for the third time. She folded it carefully, put it back in the envelope, and held it to her heart.
The blizzard. Janie. The grasshoppers. Ach, my Hannah.
So much like Pharaoh of old. How long would God continue to chasten? She didn’t mention Jerry once. Sarah shook her head, hoped for the best. She knew why she’d married him, and it certainly wasn’t love. Mothers knew.
She wasn’t convinced that Hannah was capable of staying in North Dakota too much longer now, but neither could she imagine a homecoming. Oh my Hannah, my Hannah. The source of worry, of constant prayer and longing, her heart tethered to Hannah’s by the bond of motherhood, never able to fully sever it.
She folded her hands, bent her head, her lips moving in silent prayer.
When the dry late summer air took on the biting cold of autumn, Hannah and Jerry dug the potatoes from an unrelenting, heat-baked garden. Water from the house had been dumped on the potatoes by the bucketful and still it produced only a half-bushel of small, wrinkled potatoes with green tops where the searing sun had discolored them through the thin soil.
Hannah stood in the wind, her scarf tied securely around her head, looking at the potato harvest. She snorted. Picking up her bucket, she flounced off to the house, leaving Jerry to follow, lugging the half-bushel of potatoes.
She slammed plates on the table, scattered knives and forks, thumped down empty water glasses, and sliced bread with a rapid, sawing motion. She heated milk and threw in a couple of eggs. Then she sat, her arms crossed, staring at the floor.
Jerry knew this was not a time for questions. She looked at him, a frank, dark, incomprehensible stare. “What’s the use?” she asked.
“The use?” he answered, dumbly.
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“You mean the potatoes?”
“Of course.” She kept looking at him, fixing him with her dark gaze. The kitchen darkened with her mood, expanding and contracting with unspoken words. The air became heavy with their breathing, the two of them alone with their own thoughts and feelings, unable to break through a barrier of pride.
Finally, Hannah spoke. “I don’t know if I can manage another winter.”
Jerry said nothing.
“I guess you know I’ve changed. The grasshoppers. I can’t even …” Her voice faded, then stilled. “I mean, how many more calamities have to happen before I give up? I can’t take another winter. You’ll ride out to check the cattle and I’ll never know if you’ll return.”
She stopped, her face reddening. “And, I want children. I’ve known since Janie left. I want a whole pile. And I … well, I remember Abby’s impending birth too well. I’m not going to put myself through what my mother went through. I don’t have that kind of faith to believe that God will see me through in this isolated place. With me, you never know what God’s going to unleash. So, I figure, I’m about done.”
“But, I thought you had it all figured out,” Jerry said, so kindly.
“I’m not talking about money, success, or financial security. I’m letting go because I have to. How long does God have to let you know something isn’t right before you finally get it?”
Jerry blinked, shrugging his shoulders. Everything was happening too fast. But then, this was Hannah, so surprises cropped up with no warning.
“I want to go home.” The words were spoken in a flat monotone, as if she was telling herself, first. There was no question at the end, no self-pity. Only her blunt statement.
Bewildered, Jerry raised his shoulders, palms upturned from his outstretched hands. “Home? But what do you consider home?”
“Lancaster County.”
“But …” Jerry was sputtering now, trying to wrap his head around the possibility she had just presented. “You just said recently …”
She cut him off. “I know what I said. I don’t like Lancaster County. But it’s the best alternative. I’ve weighed the options, and the scales are definitely tipping toward Lancaster, for one reason. With all I’ve experienced, I’m afraid to keep on trying. I don’t have the courage. The determination, maybe, but not the courage. I can’t take the winters with you gone. It’s different now since I … uh … you know. Love you, or whatever.”
Jerry watched her face. Her eyes found his and held. Slowly he rose, his eyes fastened on hers. He reached for her, lifted her from her chair, and held her, his eyes drinking in the light in hers.
“You do love me, then?” he asked.
She stilled his words with her lips.
Much later, they sat around the supper table, dishes strewn everywhere, the cook stove turning cold, half-scraped pots and pans thrown in the sink, the fading light of evening settling across the house.
They talked, speaking freely with a new intimacy. Jerry felt reverent with this new and undeserved gift, everything he’d always longed for presented to him on a platter, almost more than he had ever prayed for. He told Hannah that he was willing to stay, willing to try again. Perhaps another year would be the opposite of this one.
She reminded him that the year after that could be exactly like this one. It was foolish, this glue-like adherence to the homestead.
“We’ve come so far, Hannah,” Jerry protested.
“You have no heart for this place, so stop being false. You know you’d be happy to return.” Spoken
in the way only Hannah could convey feelings. He grimaced. She was looking right through him, her eyes like darts. He got away with nothing.
“All right. All right.” He threw up his hands in mock surrender.
She laughed, that short, sharp bark he seldom heard.
Sobering, she told him what had helped her make this choice. “I could probably live here if it wasn’t for our heritage. Our way of living, our lives entwined with people like ourselves. We have no one who truly understands us. I’ve come to the conclusion that family is important. So is community. Relatives, extended family. I don’t miss people. I just miss my mother and Manny. I don’t want to …” Here she faltered, then her eyes found his and stayed. “I want to be close to my mother when … you know, we have babies.”
Jerry nodded and breathed deeply. “So, it seems as if we have plans to make and more work than we’ll get done if we want to leave before the snow flies.”
Her eyes shone. “Oh, Jerry,” she breathed. “Now that we’re going, I feel as if I can’t stay in this house another day. I want to go now. This instant!”
“Not too long ago, you had it all figured out. What it would take to stay here. Remember?”
“I do. And I would turn into a real plains-woman if I had been born and raised here with the rest of these tough, old characters. Perhaps I’ve grown up. Who knows? I will always love North Dakota, the wide open spaces, grass, cattle, riding horseback, the isolation. But I want a whole houseful of children like Janie. That toddle around and fill the house with their funny words and well…. You know, Jerry. Janie was sent into my life to direct my path. It’s strange, but she was. I’ll never get over losing her.”
She paused. A distasteful expression crossed her face. “I’ll never get over the grasshoppers, either.”
“No, you won’t. But you know what I think? I think they may have finished what Janie started.”
“Now don’t you get all prophetic and spiritual,” she said, eyeing him with a look that still held the old rebellion.
“Hoi schrecka.”
“Hoi what?” Hannah asked.
“Hoi schrecka. Grasshoppers.”
“Hoi schrecka is German for grasshoppers? Literally, that’s hay scarers.”
Jerry’s eyes turned gleeful, teasing. “Scared you straight into my arms. I love it. I pitied you, but it was extremely nice.”
Hannah blushed, a beautiful infusion of color, the soft stroke of delicate pink. No one would be able to produce anything close, not even the most gifted artist, Jerry thought.
“I hope we won’t always need a million grasshoppers to lead us,” he said, laughing.
They got down to business then. Hannah produced a tablet with lined paper and wrote: mules, King, saddles, harnesses. She looked at Jerry, chewed the end of the pencil, and said that this didn’t make sense.
“We can’t send all these animals to Lancaster County if we don’t know where we’re going.”
“This list is not our shipping list.”
“Well, what else is it?”
“We’re going to have to have a public auction if we want to go back before winter.”
“You mean …?” Hannah was incredulous. The thought of selling everything was staggering. For one moment, anxiety overtook her. The animals, the beloved land they had worked so hard to keep. What, exactly, was “making it” anyway? How did one go about measuring whether you were successful?
She hated that word suddenly. They had had a lot of small successes, and large ones, too. If their success was measured in dollars, then no, they weren’t exactly well to do or anything even close to profitable. The house and barn had been built from the charitable contributions of the brethren in Lancaster, as well as the surrounding community of non-Amish. They had all proved to be caring far beyond anything Hannah or Sarah had ever expected.
So, there was that. They definitely would not have made it without help. They would have been forced to go back East. But how could one measure anything in the face of all they had been through? The list went on and on, a bitter tower built with incidents, layer after layer of hard, natural disasters, each one a monument of suffering, blocks that added to the whole shaping and forming of the past years.
Were they better for all of it, or worse?
“Hannah, you’re not listening.” Hannah started, blinked, and said she heard every word, but of course, she hadn’t.
“It would cost too much, for one thing.”
Hannah had no idea what he was talking about, but kept nodding and feigning agreement.
“Should we sell everything? House stuff? Furniture?” he asked.
Hannah considered. To part with these things was something she believed she could do. The heirlooms of the past, what they’d brought from Lancaster in the covered wagon, had burned in the fire. The rest of it? All replacements. Nothing Hannah had ever become attached to. But to return empty-handed, like immigrants from another country, was not something she relished. But would anyone have to know? It’s not like everyone would be standing at her grandfather’s farm waiting for them to arrive. Maybe they could slide back into Lancaster life without a lot of fuss.
“What do you think?” Jerry’s question brought her back to the immediate problem. “If we sell everything, we had better get the public auction done as soon as possible. I don’t want to be on a train in the middle of winter,” Jerry said.
And so they sat, debating, making plans, batting problems back and forth, finding solutions in a sensible way. Hannah knew that her opinions mattered to Jerry, that she would never be like her spineless mother who had been hoodwinked into making that senseless journey, that ill-thought-out venture into the unknown, propelled by a man who seemed far inferior to her own husband.
Husband. That is what he was. He was a good man. He rose to any overriding problem, faced it squarely, and found a reasonable solution, with her help. He considered her advice. She was suddenly humbled, a sensation she didn’t like, so she said loudly, “Nobody is going to want those mules.”
“Oh, now, come on, Hannah. They’re good mules. The best. You’d be surprised how many of these ranchers still own a good pair of mules.”
“Maybe. But no one has any money.”
“Times will get better. We may not make much, but we’ll be all right.”
The day of the auction arrived, a biting wind and a steely sun bringing folks in heavy coats, hats flattened over red ears, women dressed in heavy socks and sensible boots, scarves and woolen overcoats.
Jerry had hired the florid auctioneer from the cattle sale in Pine, who arrived in a new truck, washed and gleaming like a wet bathtub, a silver bucking bronco mounted on the hood, a senseless ornament that raised Hannah’s ire.
Fat little man. He could never get on a horse, let alone one that bucked. Why would you have something like that on your truck? She watched him strutting around like an undersized bully, throwing his arms around and shouting orders. She decided he wouldn’t get any tip from her. If Jerry wanted to give him extra money for his work, then that was up to him.
Many of the women came up to Hannah, their kind, wrinkled faces curious and alight with interest. One middle-aged woman, as tall as Hannah and almost as thin, met her face-to-face, her dark eyes boring into Hannah’s with unabashed questioning.
“So, what gives?”
Hannah was on guard immediately. That was no way to greet anyone. Her eyes narrowed as her mouth stretched into a grim line that didn’t contain a shadow of a smile. Coldly, she sniffed and said, “What do you mean?”
The woman waved an arm, taking in the homestead, the furniture in neat rows, the bedding and dishes, everything they had worked so hard to set in an orderly display so that the auctioneer could move up and down the rows in an efficient manner.
“Why? Why the auction?” the woman asked, her voice gravelly like a man’s, her face lean and long with cheeks that resembled a burnt pumpkin pie, the kind that was pocked on top.
An intense dislike for
this ill-mannered upstart rose in Hannah, but she squelched the fiery retort with all the effort she could muster. “We’re going back home.”
“Where’s that at?”
“Pennsylvania.”
Putting one fist to her hip, she cocked her head and squinted, giving a short, nasty guffaw. “Chickens! Turned chicken, didya? Grasshoppers gitya?”
Hannah’s heart pounded furiously. She stood her ground, her eyes boring into the other woman’s. “It’s none of your business,” she ground out, turning and walking away, her face cooled by the prairie wind.
There were other women who spoke in a kinder fashion, but mostly, Hannah was reminded over and over that to leave a homestead was a sign of weakness. These women had mostly been born and raised here. The prairie was in their blood. Their suffering and hardship was all a part of life.
As the day wore on, Hannah felt worse and worse, sinking into a darkness that threatened to overturn her resolve. According to these folks, she was a loser. Running home to her mother, waving the white flag of defeat and crying “Uncle! Uncle!”
Then, quite suddenly, a fierce gladness welled in her. No matter what they thought, she was looking forward to seeing her mother, her face like a beacon of light that beckoned and guided her home. And that was all right.
She went to stand beside Jerry. She needed the reassurance of touching his sleeve with hers. He looked over and gave her a small smile of recognition. “Everything all right?” he asked.
She nodded. His look affirmed his love in the midst of this crowd of weathered prairie dwellers.
Hannah watched the auctioneer on his block, fascinated by the amount of spittle that sprayed into the wind. He must have an endless source of hydration somewhere in that crimson face.
Jerry whispered, “We’re getting fair prices.”
“That’s good,” Hannah whispered back.
The auctioneer’s voice was like wagon wheels rumbling across a wooden bridge. He spoke so fast that Hannah wasn’t aware that an item had been sold until the gavel was smacked against the wooden partition in front of him.
