What Will Be Made Plain

by Latayne C A Scott

  Papa is talking again and I understand that all his stories about the city are to show that we shouldn’t want to go there.

  “It smells bad there, like diesel smoke everywhere, and people drive their cars like, like…” he searches for a word, “like everything is an emergency.”

  I reach for the plate of cornbread, baked in sticks that look like little ears of corn. I can’t wait to eat it, its brown crust rough and grainy and crisp, the yellow insides still steaming. I break off a piece and suck the steam into the back of my throat. The butter I put on it has disappeared into its pores but I think of the cream, the churning, its flat richness. About the butter that I press into forms, with my handprint on the bottom that no one ever looks at.

  “There were young people walking the streets and they dressed stupid, you should have seen them,” Papa says. He is piling food on his plate and I wonder if he refused to eat when he was with the Amish. He would do that, just to make a point.

  “Stupid?” Miriam asks.

  “Well, yes, it’s January and some of the girls were wearing short skirts and high heels,” he walked two fingers across the table, wobbling, “And their legs and feet looked like they would turn blue,” he says. “That’s not just worldly, it’s stupid.”

  We all nod.

  “And there were others, dressed all in black, with eyes like raccoons,” he says, making rings around his eyes with his index finger. Then his finger goes to the side of his head, still circling: crazy.

  Sarah and Miriam laugh but I am seeing a strong young man with short black hair, walking with a group, and they are talking about dead people like someone would talk about their relatives.

  “And I had a run-in, I guess you’d call it, with a fat man who was walking with his family near the courthouse who must have been a tourist because he was taking pictures of everything and he pointed his camera at me,” continues Papa.

  We stop eating, all of us, because we don’t like photographs, because they are like graven images of ourselves. I wonder about the blasphemy of a picture of Matthaus dressed as a Goth. Would he still be handsome? Would it be idolatry if I saw it, I wonder? I shudder as I realize I am saying these things not only in my mind, but with my lips moving silently. Miriam looks at me.

  “So I wave him away,” Papa says, “and I tell him he can’t take my picture, and he walks off telling his family that this is the way those Mormons always are.”

  “Mormons?” Miriam and I and Sarah say the word at the same time.

  Papa nods, and I can see he doesn’t want to finish the story before he swallows some of his cornbread. He takes a long, gulping drink of milk, nearly draining the tall, heavy glass.

  “Yes,” he says, wiping some butter off that has dripped onto his beard. “There are several communities of Mormons up in Jackson County.”

  I have heard of them, of golden plates and secret temples.

  “Do they practice polygamy?” Sarah’s voice is quiet. “Do the men have more than one wife? They believe God would allow this?”

  Papa seems surprised at her interest in this, even uncomfortable. “Why, no, I don’t think so. They’re not part of the big church in Utah. In fact, the ones who have wives,” his voice catches a bit, “those ones are offshoots, not the Missouri ones and not the Utah ones.”

  “So why did he, the tourist I mean, think you were a Mormon?” Miriam asks. I think she feels the tension in the room and is trying to diffuse something by continuing the conversation. I look at her and wonder how short the winter will be, how quickly spring will come, when she will go away.

  Papa considers for a moment how to answer this. “In other parts of the country there are Mormons who live in communities, apart from the world, like us. And some of the women dress plain too. So maybe he was thinking of that.”

  Sarah begins putting food in her mouth, clattering the fork against her front teeth as she does when she is upset, and I can’t understand what just happened. But my attention now is on the meat we are eating. Papa slaughtered one of our oldest heifers before he left and hung it in the smokehouse, and this is our first meal from the meat.

  I can’t seem to cut it across the grain—it separates into hanks like wet wool. The fibers are tough and roll against the edge of my knife. It has a gamey taste to it, as if wildness is embedded in the strings. It is almost as if it has a voice.

  I don’t realize I am speaking aloud.

  “It’s like this meat has the memory of a life spent trying to escape,” I say, as if it is up to me to explain the meat. I remember the old heifer, and can’t remember a single time that she ever even walked fast, so I am confusing myself but it doesn’t stop me from saying something else.

  “Ran like hell away from something,” I say matter-of-factly.

  I look up and Miriam is frowning and her mouth is open, perplexed at my profanity.

  We don’t speak that way in this house. We don’t speak that way in this house. We don’t speak that way in this house. I realize these words are only in my mind and my memory. I don’t know what I am saying aloud.

  I’m afraid to look at Papa because he must be furious. So I look down for a moment but there is only the sound of silverware against the sides of stoneware plates.

  When I raise my eyes, Papa is not looking at me. He is looking with dull eyes at Sarah, and his face is pale and bloodless like his feet were when he was warming them, and butter is dripping off his beard onto his shirt.

  Sarah’s face turns dark, and she scoots her chair back as if she is going to leave the table. But Papa reaches out and grabs her wrist and brings her back down. She picks up her fork and it rattles against her teeth because there is nothing on it. She eats like a machine, putting noisy bites into her mouth and not chewing until her cheeks are bulging, as if she’s forgotten how to eat. When she swallows, she chokes.

  Miriam glares at me as she stands behind her mother, patting her on the back, and Papa hands her a glass of water without looking at her, as if he were passing the dish of green beans to a hungry visitor.

  I had thought before that this winter would be so short, that the time would, like all precious time, slip quickly away because Miriam would be leaving. But she is angry at me because I have said something nutty again and the night is spoiled because of me.

  And she’s right. The airy warmth that was in the kitchen has become stiff and heavy and is seeping out of it, behind the sashes of the starched black curtains, curling and elongating itself so that it can slide like whistling in the cold, vapor from once-warm lips, into the brittle night.

  Chapter 10

  I am preparing for bed and the house is no longer silent, because the wind has begun to blow. There is a pyracantha—Mama used to call it a firethorn bush—outside my window and it seems to be clawing against the screen. I know it is the pyracantha because I have taken the kerosene lamp to the window and opened the curtains and looked outside into the night so that I can see what is scratching the screen. But it took me a long time, and praying over and over, before I could open the curtains. And now that I have seen it, I don’t feel much better.

  I sit on the edge of my bed and I am trying to figure out ways to keep from sleeping because I don’t want to dream tonight. I tiptoe to Miriam’s doorway and see that she is lying on her back and already snoring softly, one arm thrown across the fan-design quilt as if seeking her Ryan, the other curled so that her wrist and fingers seem to make a halo over her head.

  I actually walk all the way into her room before I stop myself from climbing into her big double bed with her. I don’t know what she would do, kick me out I suppose, so I tiptoe back past the closed door of Papa and Sarah’s bedroom and something about that closed door makes me even more afraid, so I back away from it, into my bedroom. My feet make whispers as they slide against the hardwood floor.

  At once the wind stops and I do too; and it is completely silent, as if the house is holding its breath.

  Then I hear it, plain as day, Papa’s voice.
But it seems to be coming from everywhere but their room. It seems to be behind me, so I whirl and look and know that in my room there is nowhere he could be. He is too big to fit under my bed or in my little dresser. Besides the bedside table, there is nothing else in the room.

  I hear the words, and even as they begin, I know what they will be, because they are coming from my memory.

  “She ran like hell,” I hear Papa’s voice saying, and I know what words come next.

  “I can’t find her anywhere.”

  I cannot stay alone with these words from my mind.

  I bolt into Miriam’s room and dive beneath her covers. I can’t believe my shivering does not wake her up, because her outstretched arm is lying across my shoulders.

  I’m afraid I will hear the voice again. I think that I will never get to sleep, but I do.

  In my dreams, I see the same thing over and over again. I see cornfields, and I know there is danger there. I see something that moves and lunges between the stalks, making them shudder and their tassels jerk like a horsetail against summer flies. And then the cornstalks become indistinct, as if I am viewing them from far away in the dark, not close up as before. They look like they are coming toward me, as if they are dragging their deep fiber-rooted feet, coming toward me.

  My mother stands before the cornfield, and she is dressed in her wedding dress, the blue dress that she also wore when she was buried. She has one hand beside her face like she is trying to decide something. But she looks up at me and with the other hand, her palm open, points to the fields.

  I am trying to see, trying, trying to see.

  She looks at me and points again, as if by stabbing her finger toward it I will be able to know what she is showing me. She is speaking again, and even though I know I am dreaming I also know that in Miriam’s bed I am shivering and crying hot tears because I cannot see what she wants me to see and cannot hear her words.

  But then her face seems clearer to me and she speaks again, slowly like she did when I was a child, teaching me words. I cannot hear anything.

  But I can see one word on her lips.

  “Remember.” She is pointing toward the fields.

  There, there, there.

  Winter

  Chapter 11

  I know now that there is something wrong with Sarah, but I don’t know what to do with this.

  Today we are making marshmallows. It’s the first day of winter, four days till Christmas. The sun that leeches into the kitchen has the tint of storm in its weak-tea color. Papa doesn’t like for us to use the kerosene lamps in the daytime but when Miriam lights one and puts it near the stove, nobody says anything. We have to see what we’re doing here.

  Making marshmallows is a job that involves every room in your house, every unoccupied flat surface above floor level and all your bowls and cookware. Miriam even brings out the new cookware that she’d bought with money she earned from jam sold in town—that is, before her interest in Ryan had kept her on the road in the courting buggy or hanging around the mailbox in all her spare time instead of making jam.

  Only two pots sit on the stove, and Miriam and I are watching them anxiously as the mixture of water, sugar, and syrup boils. Sarah keeps putting a candy thermometer in each bubbling saucepan (even though even I can tell that neither is anywhere near the soft-ball stage) and then washing it in hot soapy water and rinsing and drying it. Dip, look, wash, rinse, dry.

  Throughout the house every other pot and pan and tin we own sits holding two inches of flour, leveled and patted down. Pressed into these dusty surfaces is the imprint of a small plastic heart-shaped box that once held—well, none of us knows what it once held, just that each Christmas we use it to make the molds for the marshmallows.

  All at once—and this is the way all candies happen, I have learned—the flame-hot syrup is ready. Miriam and I stand now behind two stainless steel mixing bowls where a gelatin and water mixture has been blooming for the last hour and Sarah ladles the syrup into each of our bowls in slow strings.

  We look across our bowls, Miriam and I, and begin beating the mixture with our egg beaters while Sarah washes the crusting cooking pots.

  The sugar smell is faint but fragrant, like shy flowers. At first the beating is easy and our hands have to keep slow so as not to spatter the froth. But as the syrup begins to cool in the gelatin, the mixture begins to thicken, and I hold my head back so the sweat doesn’t drop into the mixture. My arms begin to hurt. Sarah walks between us, from bowl to bowl, spelling us each while we rub our aching fingers and pop our necks. We switch to wire whisks and continue beating.

  At last the bowls are filled with mounds of stiff, gleaming whiteness. Sarah has brought the flour-filled pans from the living room and she gingerly hands us each pans into which we spoon the still-warm marshmallows, fast, fast before it cools too much. Sarah is coming and going, coming and going, bringing us pans from elsewhere in the house until each heart-shaped depression is filled with the candy.

  With our bowls emptied, I wash them in hot suds. I can see Sarah and Miriam moving through the house, using little pastry brushes to sweep flour onto the top surfaces of the marshmallows before they lose their stickiness, flour to protect them from each other.

  We sit sipping Kaffi with sweetened peppermint cream that Miriam has figured out how to make after she had some in town last week. The hard part of the marshmallow adventure is done. Tomorrow we will melt bitter-dark chocolate in double boilers and the snow-white hearts will disappear beneath the darkness, then rise to blackness of life. I say this jokingly to Miriam and Sarah and they stare at me.

  “You know, rise to newness of life,” I say, quoting Scripture, and as it usually does when I quote the Bible, it seems to irritate people even when I am making a fairly decent joke.

  Then the next day we will squeeze colored almond bark through pastry decorators and pinpricks in plastic bags and decorate the hearts, and put them into mini-muffin papers and then into Christmas tins: Sarah’s family custom for years, gifts for the whole community.

  “Let me gather up all the marshmallows and put them in the tins,” I say to Miriam and Sarah. “You can go to Sister Rachel’s for the quilting.” I see Sarah nearly bolting from her seat. She is such a good quilter—she can put ten stitches on her short little needle and is the marvel of all who watch her.

  Perhaps only bent over a quilting frame is she ever fully tolerated in the community of women, sewing herself into it.

  I used to quilt but have found that there, again, I make the women uncomfortable because I don’t talk about babies or crafts or other women things. I want to talk about Bible stories, and no matter how I start out the women are suspicious. And with good cause. I always end up turning the conversation by a question about heaven, or other things you can’t see. And for a group of women who bend peering over tiny stitches in winter light and kerosene lamp, the only unseen that matters is the needle that in the darkness of the batting seeks the underside of the quilt, that pokes through and pricks your finger and stains the quilt.

  I tried to stay connected to the community’s life by offering to piece the quilts. But I have found that I can’t put pieces together any more. So I am relegated to the first step of quilting, the cutting out of little squares and triangles that make no sense at all. The women give me bolts and bundles of fabric prewashed and ironed into long four-layer strips, with stiff cardboard patterns and instructions written on paper pinned to the cloth. I am glad to do this task alone, because I can bend as close to the cutting board as I need to in order to see, my nose nearly touching it sometimes, and with the rotary cutter I trim the fabric. Even now a table near the front door seems to sag under its load of fabric for me to cut.

  Sarah has already put on her coat and gone out the door and I can see her outside the window, pulling her fur-lined boots through the snow in the shade between the houses on her way to the quilting session, her little sewing bag clutched tight to her chest. I feel sorry for her, because I know s
he’s not really welcome where she’s going and yet I know she doesn’t want to be in our house, either.

  “I’ll help you,” Miriam says. “I’ll go later.” She seems to have forgotten about being angry with me.

  She and I bring the flour-filled containers to the kitchen and I line large tins with waxed paper. We carefully lift the marshmallows onto the paper and stack them in layers five deep and seal them against the moisture in the room.

  “Is this really the simple life?” I ask Miriam. She looks at me for a moment and I continue. “We could buy marshmallows in town and then decorate them.” I’m tired and grumpy. She laughs at me, at us, at one of the paradoxes of our simple life that we make from scratch many things like pretzels and vanilla wafers and marshmallows when they can often be bought in bulk, I have heard, for cheaper than the ingredients. And then there’s the time. The hours, and the cleanup.

  We both know the answer. Our own marshmallows are creamy delights, not like the chewy-edged, off-tasting ones in bags. Our pretzels are so good that people in town pay a big price for them. And the vanilla wafers, and other baked goods—no one would ever again enjoy the ones in boxes or mummified in cellophane if they had ours.

  We have taken all the marshmallows out of the pans and I realize that Miriam is staring into one of them. While we were talking, I guess I smoothed the surface of the flour as if to receive another set of molds for marshmallows—but then put the palm of my hand into the flour.

  “Why do you do that?” Miriam’s voice is gentle but probing.

  “Do what?” I sweep my hand over the imprint and start pushing the flour toward the corner of the pan so that we can put it back into the flour canisters.

  “Why do you put handprints on everything?” I am startled. I didn’t know anyone noticed the handprints on the butter. Where else had I done it, as unaware at the time as I was of what I just did in the flour?