Lost Without the River

by Barbara Hoffbeck Scoblic

  Oh my God, dear God, did you have this planned all along? Or if it was not planned, because there is free will, after all, then did you know that this was what was to be? Dear Lord, I’m so tired. So lonely. I haven’t even thought that before. No time to realize I’m lonely! Is that part of Your plan, then? Keep me so busy, so tired, that I can’t even feel? Just keep me moving and working another day? It isn’t just people or visiting I need; it’s relief, some hope that things will get better. Last spring when I saw the new Easter hats in church, I didn’t envy the ribbons or flowers—I resented the promise of renewal those hats represented.

  Myrtle remembers a Saturday afternoon the spring of her senior year. Just for fun, she and her sisters set out to try on every new hat in Pierre. In the first store, they managed to appear serious, carefully modeling one hat and then another, solemnly deciding against each one. But in the second store, when Marian tried on an outrageous scarlet cloche with ostrich feathers, all of them began to giggle. They ran out of the store and around the corner. As Myrtle remembers the color of that hat, the sound of her sisters’ laughter echoing off nearby buildings, the softness of their bodies as they held each other, her days and this night close in on her, drab and empty.

  Myrtle looks up at the sky. The moon is no longer visible, but its reflected light makes a soft glow in the east beyond the hills. The sky is magnificent and humbling. Myrtle walks to the step, picks up the long sled, and carries it to a flat, open space in the middle of the yard. She sits on it, then lies back, resting her head on her hands, face to the sky.

  At a grand and glorious distance, the Milky Way sweeps across the sky, the stars as individual and numerous as grains of powdered sugar on the surface of a chocolate cake. Lower, much closer—if she took the tall ladder from the barn, she thinks, she could reach up and touch them—are the diamonds of the Big Dipper, and there, nearer yet, the Little Dipper. Myrtle sees movement out of the corner of her eye and turns her head. A star falls gently, lightly, and then, before it disappears, she sees another fall near the first, and then yet another. Myrtle watches closely, hoping the shower of falling stars will continue. Blackie brushes her face with his nose and woofs anxiously. Myrtle puts her arm around his neck and pulls him close.

  “It’ll be all right,” she whispers into his soft neck.

  His rough tongue wipes her face. Myrtle holds the dog close for a moment and then gets up to go check on the river.

  THE EMPTY CRIB

  Before Myrtle opens her eyes, raises her head from the pillow, before she realizes it is midafternoon, not early morning, she feels a pain clamping down, deep in her middle. Something—for one horrible thump of her heart, she can’t remember what—is different. Something is terribly wrong.

  Dorothy. Dorothy is gone. With an effort of will, she sits up, leans down, and puts on her shoes. She stands. Then, leaving the bed in disarray, she walks to the dining room, to the corner where the large, varnished oak crib stands empty. A worn blanket lies at its end. A small pillow with an indentation rests at its head. The clock on the buffet sounds a steady tock-tock, tocktock. Myrtle picks up the blanket. It was once a deep rose color. After being washed every Monday for so many years, it has lost its beauty. It is now the color of flesh. Myrtle holds the blanket close against her chest, then folds it neatly into a rectangle and replaces it at the foot of the crib. She doesn’t pick up the pillow to fluff it, but instead leaves it with its head-shaped hollow.

  At that meeting in the rectory last spring with Roy and Father Esterguard, she’d asked that Dorothy not be moved until fall, to allow her daughter to enjoy one more summer, with its gentle breezes moving the white curtains at the window, one more summer hearing the noise and laughter of her brothers and sisters. It seemed a small victory for Myrtle and a big one for Dorothy.

  But today she knows that she miscalculated. On that cool May evening when she let her hold on Dorothy slip, she didn’t think ahead to realize that this fall Barbara will start school. Myrtle realizes she is alone in the house for the first time since Dorothy’s birth, seventeen years ago. And the emptiness of the house taunts her.

  Father Esterguard began by saying, “Dorothy’s getting too much for you,” but stopped when Myrtle shook her head and looked at him.

  “Uh …” He paused, then began again. “You must think not just of Dorothy, but of your other children as well.” He cleared his throat. “Helen and Patt are teenagers now. They need to be able to bring their friends home without …” He stopped, started again. “Without …” He swallowed.

  Myrtle noticed his Adam’s apple disappearing below his Roman collar, then reappearing. She did not look directly at Roy but knew he was staring at his hands, where he was flipping his jackknife over and over. It reminded Myrtle of a fish she had seen caught in a pool of the shrinking river one recent summer.

  “Without,” Myrtle finished the priest’s sentence, looking at him with steady eyes, “being embarrassed.”

  His silence let her know that she was correct.

  She remembered the time two years earlier when Patt and Helen had run to her, both angry and talking over each other.

  A classmate had visited our house for the first time. The girl had entered the dining room and, upon seeing the crib in the corner, walked right up to it and peered inside.

  “What is that?” she’d asked, with scorn in her voice. She pointed and began to laugh.

  Myrtle had been unable to find words to ease Patt and Helen’s pain.

  At that meeting with Father Esterguard, she’d agreed that Dorothy be moved to the hospital to be taken care of by the sisters, as the two men had suggested, though not immediately, but rather in a few months, in early September. They’d quickly granted her that request, grateful, she knew, that she’d neither argued nor cried. This morning as she worked, she’d been able to avoid thinking, able to ignore the pain of her betrayal, but at their midday dinner, after grace, as Roy ate and listened intently, with furrowed brow, to the radio, the time when she had always fed Dorothy, her pain became physical and she was unable to eat. What was Dorothy thinking now? She must be asking, Where is my mother? Why did she leave me here? When will she come back for me? Myrtle sat still. Then after the rapid, excited reporting of the cattle and hog futures ended and the Folgers commercial began, Roy turned down the radio and looked at her questioningly.

  Myrtle spoke: “Who’s feeding her now?”

  He didn’t ask whom she was inquiring about. “The sisters, of course.”

  “They’ll hurry her. She’ll gag.”

  “The sisters will know how to do it. They’ll understand.”

  “She’s only used to me. She’ll be so scared. Maybe she won’t be able to eat at all.”

  Roy stopped. Myrtle knew he was frustrated, knowing there was nothing he could say that would help. He was quiet as he continued to eat, the sound of his fork and knife hitting the plate echoing in the small room. Myrtle got up to serve coffee, poured a cup for Roy, and stayed standing. She certainly couldn’t drink any coffee, but, to be polite, she sat again.

  When Roy finished his coffee, he got up and came to stand behind her chair. Resting his hands on her shoulders, he pulled her back gently so that her head rested on his chest. Then he leaned down and kissed the top of her head.

  THE WHITE DRESS

  My sister Helen made the dress Dorothy wore to heaven. Taking an old dress of Dorothy’s, she opened up all the seams and used the pieces as a pattern. After supper, while I was helping Mother wash the dishes, she took the tablecloth and the protective pads off the dining room table and laid out the shining cotton that she had bought at Penney’s in Ortonville.

  All that evening, she cut and pressed and sewed. By morning, only the hem was left to be done. The sleeves were long, with three pearl buttons on each cuff. The small, round collar was trimmed with white lace, and, down the front, rows of more flowery lace made a tiny garden of white.

  Helen made a long sash. Bob and I stood there, watching her p
ush the needle in and out. Bob asked her why she worked so hard to make the edges perfect. No one would see the sash, anyway.

  Helen stopped sewing and very slowly put the needle with the thread still attached to it under a few strands on the spool. She didn’t answer Bob, didn’t even look at him. She stood and tenderly smoothed the folds of the dress. She then held out each end of the sash away from her to make sure they matched perfectly.

  V. WE BEGIN TO LEAVE

  ONE BY ONE

  When I envision those years on the farm, I think of us all together—squabbling, working, laughing—but in reality there wasn’t much time when we were all there, sleeping alone or, more likely, sharing a bed, under the shingled roof of our farmhouse.

  When Helen was four, she was sent to live with our father’s parents, Bert and Anna, on their farm northwest of Big Stone. That farm, unlike ours, wasn’t set near a river in the woods but rather sat exposed on the open prairie. The only trees were Russian olives, planted in rows at the edges of fields in an attempt to tame the unending winds. Not that many years earlier, the land had been plowed for the first time, by my grandfather. He’d filed the necessary government papers to establish it as homestead property for his sister.

  The teacher of the one-room schoolhouse boarded with Bert and Anna. When the teacher walked the mile to school, she took Helen with her. For two years, she helped Helen learn as she taught her older pupils. Helen returned to our farm in time to enroll in first grade in the town elementary school.

  Bill, who almost died from an allergic reaction to the smallpox vaccination he received at six months and who, as a toddler, was often in agony because of his severe, chronic eczema, needed extra care, so he, too, was sent to live with Bert and Anna. He continued to live with them when they moved to town. Bill rejoined our family when he was ten; by that age, he could lend substantial help with the chores.

  Both Helen and Bill basked in the attention of Bert and Anna, who were strict but loving grandparents. As far as longterm effects of this time away went, their reactions are evidence of what we already know: siblings view things differently from their earliest days. For Helen, it was a positive experience.

  “I loved my teacher in that little school. I was doing so well, but when I began school in town, I floundered. It set me back, I never recovered academically.”

  Bill concurs—“I never could catch up with my classmates in town”—but blames the one-room schoolhouse, calling it a “disservice.”

  Both of these drastic actions were taken to give relief to my mother. During those years, she had not only an infant and a toddler to care for, but Dorothy as well. And because Dorothy didn’t have control over her muscles, she couldn’t cooperate in the diaper-changing or bathing process. My mother was working with dead weight. And, of course, Dorothy still needed to be spoon-fed.

  It exhausts me to think of all those diapers that were added each time a new baby arrived. More diapers to be added to the sheets and dirty work clothes that, in a series of exhausting steps, had to be made wearable again. And there were the meals to be cooked, the dishes to be washed.

  What space of time were we all together on the farm? I was born in 1939. Dorothy died in 1947. So there were only eight years when my siblings and I were all alive.

  But that’s not the number I’m trying to calculate. Bill knows he returned at some point during 1945, the year Dorothy was taken to live with the nuns. He isn’t sure how old he was when he was sent to live with our grandparents, but it was certainly before he turned three. There are five years between Bill and me. As I ponder these numbers, I realize, with astonishment, there was never a time when we were all together in our farmhouse.

  Our family continually expanded and contracted. It seems as though that shifting style was somewhat of a family tradition.

  Only a year or so after they’d emigrated from Denmark to Minnesota, Bert, my grandfather, and his brother, Ness, both bachelors, welcomed an infant girl into their home. A neighbor woman had died in childbirth, and her husband, overcome with grief, suffered a nervous breakdown. He wasn’t capable of caring for his baby daughter. Somehow those brothers, my grandfather and great-uncle—only in their early twenties—did just that, bringing the baby into their house, which was little more than a cabin, while they continued the hard work of cultivating the first crops on the new land.

  And then, years later, after Bert had married, moved to South Dakota, and raised children of his own, he persuaded Anna that they should take in two elementary school-age neighbor girls after their parents had been killed in an automobile accident.

  The separation from Helen and Bill must have been wrenching for my mother. But time and circumstance demanded that she be practical. She knew that Helen and Bill would receive more care and attention from their grandparents than she could give. Her understanding and flexibility had a limit, however.

  My mother’s brother, Brit, lived in Sioux Falls, a city 120 miles south of our farm. He was a civil engineer, a career that offered opportunity and good wages, even during those depression years. He and his wife, Anne, were economically secure, but they were unhappy. They wanted a child, and Anne was unable to become pregnant.

  During one of their occasional visits to our farm, Anne and Brit waited until after my mother had stopped working, long after she’d made and served dinner, after Dorothy had been tended to and Helen and Patt tucked into their shared bed—waited, I imagine, until the moment when my father, in his nightly ritual, stepped out onto the porch to check the night sky. It was then that they looked at each other and with a nod agreed that it was the right time.

  It would have been Brit who spoke first. He would have begun slowly, tentatively.

  “Myrtle, we see that you have more than you can do. You’re exhausted. We can help. We have resources and can give a child the best of everything. Would you please consider this? We’d like to have Patsy come live with us.”

  He hesitated, then added, “We’d like to adopt her.”

  At the time, Patt was three. Mother told him she’d have to discuss it with Roy. My father supported my mother, and together they told Brit and Anne, “No, we won’t give up our daughter.”

  Patt stayed. But when she learned of this offer as a teenager, she wasn’t grateful that she’d stayed with us but rather became resentful, imagining the easy life that could have been hers. A life that would have been rich in cultural activities, as well as material belongings. A life where she wouldn’t have had to work so hard to earn her way through college. A life far removed from the unending toil demanded of all of us.

  Of course, her resentment toward our father played a part in this, too. One summer afternoon when Patt was twelve, our father rushed into the house from the yard. Hummy, a mixed breed that Patt loved and considered her dog, had been chasing the chickens. Our father returned with the rifle, and, as Patt watched helplessly, he aimed and shot the dog dead. She never forgave him.

  The last time I saw Patt, who died in 2009, heavy bitterness weighed down her frail voice when she spoke of that day our father killed Hummy.

  When our parents were making those serious, painful decisions to send Helen and Bill away, to refuse the adoption offer, there was never a discussion about one presence. Dorothy stayed with us for eleven more years.

  PACKING UP

  Our family began to shrink. After she graduated from high school, Helen left for Minneapolis, where she enrolled in business school. She packed quietly and left without a fuss. The next year, there was more drama as Patt prepared to leave.

  Patt’s gone. Mother and I helped her get ready.

  Yesterday we washed and starched her blouses and skirts. Patt and I hauled them out to the lawn in a large basket. She held one handle in her left hand; I held the other with both my hands, shuffling sideways down the south porch steps.

  Patt likes to do everything in a hurry. Everything. I asked her once if she slept fast, too. She gave me one of her smiles. I knew what that meant. I’m nine years y
ounger than she is. But then she stopped smiling and looked serious.

  “I wish I could sleep faster, but no one can. I just sleep less. Just think of it. Use your math, Barb. One less hour of sleep a day, and in a week I’ve saved another person’s working day. And if ever you can’t sleep at night, don’t just lie there! Turn on the light and read. Don’t waste time trying to get back to sleep. There’s so much to do.”

  For Patt, wasting time was a sin.

  Yesterday my job was to pick up a piece of clothing, shake it out fast, and hold it up to her. She’d take it and quickly fasten it to the line with two wooden clothespins, using the last pin for the next piece, so the corners of two garments shared one pin.

  Change was in the air. The wild asters in the low weeds at the edge of the lawn were still in bloom, but their vivid blue-purple was now pale and faded, the color of a dress washed over and over. Blackbirds in the trees seemed to be arguing about when to go south. They jabbered amid the branches, then burst into the air, flapping around before they regrouped. Were they looking for their brothers and sisters so they could make the trip together?

  A cool breeze hinted at winter storms.

  “Barb, next piece!” Patt kept at her chore. When she’d finished, the clothespins stood at attention all down the line. The wind billowed and filled the blouses and skirts, setting them to dancing.

  Later, Patt and I went out again. The clothes were dry now and smelled a little of soap, a little of September sunshine. As we reversed the process, the blouses and skirts felt stiff. Patt tossed the clothes into the basket, the pins onto the grass. I picked up the pins and put them into their cloth bag.