We made a red velvet cake with chocolate icing and chicken-fried steak for Morgan’s birthday supper. Morgan ate three slices of cake and, ignoring Mama’s raised eyebrows, I let him, even though I wondered if I’d be up half the night tending a child with a bellyache. I was. Ruby joined us for the party and gave Morgan a counting picture book. Mama gave him a new cap with earflaps that buttoned down. Papa had carved a little wooden biplane with a bright red propeller that wound up with a rubber band and spun so fast it melted into a scarlet blur.
My present was the lemon drops I’d bought at Dwyer’s, along with a quilt for his new bed in the room Papa had added on to the house the month before. It was one of the prettiest quilts I’d ever made and so right for Morgan. It was like a painting of fabric just for him. The setting cotton sun shone rays of light across the plains and spilled a spectrum of color over the clouds, gold blending to vermilion, creeping upward to the deep night sky until it joined the border of midnight blue I’d embroidered with golden-white stars.
Morgan’s eyes shone as he unwrapped the soft folds of cotton and brushed the little starpoints with his fingers. “Oh, Mama!” he whispered in wonderment without taking his eyes off the quilt. “It’s just like my dream! You stitched my dreams right out of your fingers! How’d you do that?” he marveled, turning his gray-blue eyes to me, amazed, as though discovering the woman before him was more magician than mother.
That night I tucked him into bed with his new toy plane right next to him. He was still fingering the quilt, tracing the outlines of the clouds as he sucked on a lemon drop. I leaned down to kiss him on the head, then settled myself comfortably on the edge of the bed.
“Do you like your quilt, baby?”
“It’s the whole sky on my bed! Look,” he said soaring the wooden biplane over the quilted landscape, “I can fly my plane over Papaw’s fields and over here to the hills, all the way to Kansas! ’Bout a million miles!”
“Kansas isn’t quite a million miles away, but almost,” I said with a smile. “And what about here?” I pointed to the starlit border. “Where do you end up when you fly over there?”
He shook his head solemnly. “Oh, you can’t fly there. That’s heaven over there, where my papa is.”
“Where your papa is?” I frowned. “Who told you that?”
Morgan wound the propeller of his plane with his finger absentmindedly. “Nobody ’zactly. I just been thinking about it. Johnny McCurdle said I didn’t have a pa. I said I did too, that Papaw was my pa, but Johnny said that wasn’t right. He said Papaw was your pa, and I didn’t have one.”
I sucked in my breath, searching his little face for signs of worry, my mind speeding ahead trying to anticipate his questions and come up with a story true enough to help him know who he was and vague enough to preserve his pride.
“But that can’t be right,” he continued wisely. “Everybody has a pa, so I thought about it a long time and I decided if my pa isn’t here that means he must be in heaven.” He left off playing with the plane and looked up at me trustingly. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I breathed, releasing the air that crowded my lungs. “That’s right. Your papa was a brave man—an airplane pilot. He was an airmail flier. One day his plane crashed, and so he went to heaven.”
Morgan nodded his agreement. “And he’s there now”—he pointed to a starred corner of his quilt—“watching me. And someday I’m going to fly an airplane just like him, and when I’m big I’ll go to heaven and see him. Then later you’ll come too, won’t you, Mama?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “But, I’ll go first, long before you do. You won’t go to heaven for a long, long time.”
“Why not?” he asked innocently.
“Because mamas and papas go first, that’s why. So they can get everything ready for their children.”
“Oh.” He yawned and snuggled under the covers, satisfied with my explanation. I sat by his bed for a long time, watching him, warm and safe under the quilt. His steady breathing stirred the covers, making the sun rise and set under the heavens I’d created for him with my own hands.
I dreamed of Slim that night, but it was clearer than dreaming and sharper than life. I could see him in the flesh and feel his thoughts, and I could pull, from a well of knowledge that he could not tap, the outlines of the road that lay ahead for him.
It was cold and cloudy. Slim stood alone on the field, but there were dozens of people standing nearby watching him, making it hard to concentrate. He knew they were waiting for him, hoping he’d try and believing he’d fail. A wave of fear washed over him, fear of failure, fear of waiting too long and missing his window, fear of being afraid.
For an instant, just a breath, I knew he felt I was there. He looked straight into my eyes as though I’d just walked in a room, the same look of recognition his face that had been there the first time I’d seen him in our kitchen. I wanted to take him in my arms, tell him I’d always love him, no matter what happened, and then, as quickly as it had lifted, the curtain fell between us and I was invisible once more.
“God hates a coward,” he whispered to himself. Straightening his shoulders, he turned to face the waiting group of hangers on and said simply, “Let’s go.” He turned his back to me and walked toward the silvery plane, waiting, ghostly and expectant, at the end of the runway. I lost sight of him as a cloudy dawn obscured him from me and the world.
I woke instantly, the dream complete and intact in my mind. I had no doubt that everything had happened just I’d seen it in the dream. I couldn’t sleep anymore. There was nothing to do but wait.
I sat at my quilting frame, stitching thread clouds on a field of monotonous blue, passing the eternal hours of night. When morning came I was distracted and unsettled. Any moment when I wasn’t needed by Mama, Papa, or Morgan found me back at the quilt frame sewing piercing tracks across the cotton sky, keeping my hands busy and my mind blank until the confirmation came in bold, black newsprint. On the twenty-first of May, 1927, Charles A. Lindbergh landed safely at LeBourget Field in Paris.
The headlines screamed his victory as though it were theirs. The photos showed him being greeted by jubilant throngs, surrounded by a mass of rapturous faces. There were so many thousands that I could hardly see Slim’s face for the crush of these strangers who suddenly owned the rights to him, who heard without listening and touched without feeling. I finally understood my apprehension in the theater. These were the ones to fear. They were the undertow I’d sensed, waiting on the other side of the sea and around the world to submerge him under their weight as a drowning man climbs onto his savior and shoves him under, killing them both in a desperate fight to breathe. The crowd was strong and hungry and terrible beyond imagining. There had never been anything like it before, the consuming worldwide adulation of one lone individual shaped and remade and poured into a mold heroic and inhuman—poured out so wide and thin that sooner or later it was bound to break.
The camera showed Slim smiling a tired, slightly confounded grin, bemused, determined to tolerate this temporary madness for the sake of aviation, a passion he was determined to share with the world.
He doesn’t understand, I thought, that it isn’t temporary. He has fulfilled his destiny more completely than he could have ever envisioned. He has sparked their imaginations so brilliantly it won’t fade tomorrow or next year. Just look at their faces; they’re smiling and cheering, but they could eat him alive with the same smile on their faces. They’ll never get enough of him. He doesn’t realize just how much he will grow to hate them.
Chapter 6
September 1927
I stood at the cutting table Papa had made for me, tracing dozens of delicate reeds onto a piece of bottle green fabric that would be appliquéd onto a swamp I’d created out of hundreds of inch-wide squares of fabric—a lush, rich everglade with an elegant, stately crane hidden in the rushes. It was monotonous and tiring, laying my sharpened pencil sideways and painstakingly outlining the same template over and over on the s
ame piece of cloth. My shoulders were knotted with tension. It was the part of quiltmaking I usually enjoyed least, but that day I found pleasure in the thoughtless routine this warm Indian summer morning, with a shaft of sunlight angling through the window, illuminating ordinary specks of floating dust and making them look like something magical and fine. I gave myself up to the rhythmic purposefulness of the job.
My little room had been turned into a kind of studio. After Morgan had moved into his own room, Papa put in a bigger window for me and placed my quilt frame under it where the light was best. In the corner, where my rocking chair sat, he’d built tall columns of shelves to hold my fabrics and notions. The cutting table was in the middle of the room, so I could walk around it easily without having to turn the fabric. Papa had made use of every inch of space, but it was still pretty tight, so I’d gotten rid of my big bed, bought a single, and shoved it up against the wall as an afterthought. I didn’t suppose I’d ever have need of a double bed again, but I missed sleeping with Morgan next to me, burrowing in the covers to be nearer, instinctively seeking out my warmth. I slept less than I had before. Now, when I woke up in the night with a new idea or a new color pressed into my memory, it was easy to stir myself to work, no matter what the hour, knowing I wouldn’t be waking the rest of the family.
Outside my window I could hear Morgan playing and talking to himself, lost in his imaginary world. Papa knocked lightly on the open door of my room and peeked around the corner to see if he was disturbing me. “Hello, Papa.” I greeted him, looking up from my work. “Come on in. I’m not doing anything that I actually have to think about.”
Papa peered over my shoulder at the piles of fabric. “That’s a nice green. Almost like dragonflies’ wings.”
“Hmm.” I nodded, searching for a pin to hold the pattern in place. “It is pretty, isn’t it?” I secured the template just where I wanted it and looked up to see Papa shifting uncomfortably from one foot to another. “Well,” I said cheerfully, “what brings you here? You must want to talk to me about something important to have come in from the fields so early.”
Papa pulled on his nose like he was trying to squash a sneeze, the way he always did when he was thinking out how to explain something. “Well ... yes,” he began hesitantly. “I saw Mr. Walden this morning. He drove by the field I was working in, on his way to deliver the ice like usual, you know. We stopped to chat and he told me that he’s coming to Oklahoma City on the thirtieth.”
The uncertain, hopeful look on Papa’s face spoke volumes, but I kept on working, feigning intense interest in placing the pattern just so. “Mr. Walden is going to Oklahoma City?” I asked innocently.
“No!” Papa frowned. “Not Walden. Slim! He’s been flying all over the country, visiting all forty-eight states in The Spirit of St. Louis. It’s kind of a victory tour, you see. Getting people all fired up about aviation. Anyway, he’s coming to Oklahoma City on the thirtieth. Walden said it was in the paper, and I thought that we could drive over there, you see, and—”
“And what, Papa?” I spoke sharply, cutting him off before he could spell out his plan. He stood awkwardly next to me, hooking and unhooking his thumbs through the straps of his overalls. I felt badly for speaking to him so sharply and continued on more gently. “And what do we do then, standing in a crowd of ten thousand people? Do I climb up on your shoulders and hold Morgan up above the crowd, hollering and waving, ‘Mr. Lindbergh, it’s me, Eva! You remember me? The crippled girl from Dillon, a thousand years ago? One night in a field? This is your son, Morgan. I’d have named him after you if only I’d known what your name was.’” Try as I might, I couldn’t keep the sarcastic edge out of my voice. “Is that what you think I should do, Papa? Because that’s how it would be.”
Papa hung his head and looked at the floor, as though the words he needed might be lying there near his shoes. “I just thought maybe, if he met Morgan. He’d, you know ...”
“Make an honest woman of me? Oh, Papa,” I said with a sigh. “I know you mean well. If you want to take Morgan, go ahead. He’s as wild about Lindbergh as all the other kids. Nobody would think anything strange in that, but I can’t go. It would just hurt too much.
“I know you want the best for Morgan and me, but it can’t happen like you imagine. Even if I could get to Slim, talk to him or write, and he actually read my letter, out of the thousands of pieces of mail he gets every week, he couldn’t marry me. He’s the biggest hero in the country, in the world. Everybody thinks he’s without a flaw, brave, strong, pure and selfless. If people found out that he’d gotten some poor crippled girl from Oklahoma in a family way and then left her, they’d hate him. I won’t be the cause of that, because even though he isn’t flawless, he is honorable. If Slim knew about Morgan, he probably would want to ‘do the right thing’ and marry me, and that would crush him and me. I won’t be responsible for his destruction.”
Papa lifted his eyes to mine, his mouth a flat line of resignation. “I just want you to have a proper life, Evangeline. I want Morgan to have a father.”
“He does,” I said. “There’s not a man in this town who cares more for his son than you do for Morgan.”
Papa scooped me into his big, muscled arms and held me close. “Evangeline,” he murmured. “My darling girl. I hope he deserves a woman like you, this Slim Lindbergh of yours.”
“Papa, I wouldn’t have done anything differently.”
They went to Oklahoma City without me. I insisted, though Mama didn’t want to leave me behind. I won the argument, saying it might be Morgan’s only chance to see his father. Someday, when he was older, I intended to tell Morgan the truth about his father, but not yet. Now it seemed important that he see Slim in the flesh, if only for a moment above the heads of a thousand people. Later he would have at least one memory of him, even though, for now, he wouldn’t know they were connected.
I tried to help Morgan put on his coat, but it wasn’t easy because of the toy airplane he held clutched in his fist. “Let go, Morgan. I can’t get your arm through the sleeve. Here, I’ll give it right back.” He gave up the plane, reluctantly.
“Mama, why can’t you go, too?” Morgan asked, frowning. “Don’t you want to see him? The plane will be there. Spirit of Saint Louis! Just like mine, but bigger! Ain’t that right, Papaw?” He looked anxiously to Papa for confirmation.
Papa nodded and assured him it would all be there, just as he imagined.
“See, Mama?” he insisted. “Don’t you want to come?” He tugged on my sleeve to make sure he had my attention.
“Of course I’d like to, Morgan, but I can’t. Somebody’s got to stay here and watch the place and feed the animals. You wouldn’t want Ranger to go hungry now, would you?”
“Well,” he whispered so as not to offend his grandparents, “what about you come and Papaw or Mamaw stays here?”
“Papaw has to drive the car, and Mamaw ... well, she’s got to go and take care of Papaw.”
Morgan’s brow furrowed as he thought about my reasoning. “But who takes care of you?” he asked after a moment’s consideration.
I smiled at him and began doing up his coat buttons. “Oh, I’m young and strong. I’ll miss you, but it’s only two days, and you can tell me all about it when you get back. I can take care of myself. I always do, don’t I?”
“Yes.” He scratched his nose and turned my logic around in his mind. “Papaw is pretty old, isn’t he? I guess he needs more help.” I nodded in agreement. Morgan’s eyes were solemn and innocent as he spoke. “Don’t you worry, Mama. When you’re old I’ll take care of you.”
“Thank you, baby.” I ruffled his blond curls with my hand and smiled. “That’s nice to know.” Morgan beamed, satisfied he’d said the right thing.
I waved good-bye from the front porch as the Ford chugged down the road trailing a cloud of dust. Morgan turned around in the backseat and waved his whole arm back and forth like a semaphore flag until I couldn’t see him anymore.
It was s
o quiet when they were gone. Even the prairie wind that constantly whistled around the house and through the trees, that high-pitched score that had been the accompaniment of my whole life, suddenly seemed to shush itself into silence. I’d never been in the house alone before. I wondered if I’d be lonely once night fell. Even so, I was glad I’d made them go.
I did the chores like always, both mine and Papa’s too. They went more quickly without Morgan dogging my steps, asking a thousand whys and insisting on “helping.” By late afternoon I’d finished everything.
My quilt frame was waiting in my room. There was plenty of work I needed to finish, but the quietness made me feel awkward about working. So I pulled Mama’s rocker onto the porch and sat doing nothing at all. Looking down at my idle hands, I felt guilty for a moment, but the sunset was so pretty, orange and coral and pink spun sugar, it seemed right that someone sit very still and admire the day’s end.
I sat for a long while in the fading light and then in the darkness, sorting out my feelings. It made me happy to think of Morgan and Slim together, even though they’d be lost to one another in the crowds. At least Morgan would know who Slim was, how he looked and sounded and walked. It was important. Someday Morgan would be able to look at parts of himself and know where they’d come from. He was only four, but it was such a big event. First overnight trip, first restaurant meal, first hero. Surely he’d remember it always. I hoped so. There was no knowing if he’d get another chance to see his father.
Five years had gone by and Slim had never returned to Oklahoma. For the first two or three I’d half-waited, half-hoped he’d turn up, even though I’d told him he mustn’t. After a while I forced myself to quit waiting and think of him as gone for good. It was better that way, I told myself. Cleaner for everyone. But that didn’t lessen the ache that crept over me at odd moments.
Finding out who he was and what he’d been doing helped lessen the pain, but it left me with questions. Certainly he had reasons enough to stay away. The boy I’d known was just Slim, a simple name for a boy with a simple life. Now he was Colonel Charles Augustus Lindbergh and his life wasn’t his own anymore. He belonged to the country more than to me—even more than he belonged to himself.
Fields Of Gold Page 8
