The Third Grace

by Deb Elkink

  Naomi had been rambling, overloading her with the minutiae of life in Tiege—about the roads being cut up because of the rains, and that the local grocery store ran out of coffee three days ago so that everyone was loading up on cola to keep awake. The way she went on, Aglaia thought, it was as if she expected the government to declare a national disaster. Yet somehow Naomi’s outpouring was calming. The rhetoric of the farmer at harvest was the same every year, when the annual income for massive operations and small family ventures alike was at the mercy of the weather. Naomi didn’t quiz her about the trip to Paris, even when Aglaia handed over the box of fine French bonbons—a thank-you gift for taking Zephyr out to Mom and Dad’s while she was gone. Aglaia didn’t need to use the excuse she’d gotten ready to deflect any possible questions about François, either, because Naomi wasn’t asking and, in fact, was maybe avoiding the subject.

  And so, by noon Naomi was hunched up against the passenger door and Aglaia, in the driver’s seat, was cruising northeastward on the interstate, listening to the radio, her fingers dialing through the available stations and getting nothing but static because of the atmospheric conditions. She eventually made do with a cassette already in the tape deck—churchy, but at least it was peaceful—as she finished off her drive-through burger and bunched the foil bag into a slot beside the ashtray, promising herself she’d throw it out later.

  So much for her plan to get right back into her routine of work and the solitude of her city apartment, Aglaia thought. She was being selfish—perhaps she was still in shock over the news about the heart attack. But things were changing in a direction she didn’t like. She didn’t like the thought that, given her dad’s hospitalization, she might be expected to act like a normal and loving daughter—whatever that was.

  She hated hospitals with their antiseptic reek of death, but her reticence to see her father was more than that. What did she plan to say to him, all hooked up with tubes and lying inert under the sheets? They hadn’t spoken much in the years since she left home, father and daughter. She evaded discussion during her rare trips back to the farm, always restricted to a couple of days during which she occupied herself with wrapping gifts to put under the tree or helping Mom bake hot cross buns while Dad kept busy with chores—plowing snow or fencing. Somehow her bond with her mother had never been totally severed, but with Dad it was different. There’d been a more complete break, with no sharing of cookbook recipes to smooth over the rough spots. When Dad had something to say, he always came straight to the point. What would he say to her today? Words of his from the past streamed into her mind.

  “Saw you out at the burning barrel this morning, Mary Grace,” her father says on the day after graduation. It’s suppertime. She hasn’t told them yet that she’s leaving.

  “Just getting rid of stuff I don’t need,” she mumbles around her mouthful of smoky ham. Then, to put off further conversation, she stuffs in some more Varenikje. It’s her favorite dish—doughy boiled pockets filled with cottage cheese and smothered in cream gravy. She’ll miss Mom’s cooking.

  “You took the old suitcase out. Going somewhere?” Dad asks.

  There’s no use trying to hide it. Mom starts to sniffle.

  “I’ve got to leave, Dad. I can’t stick around here anymore.”

  There’s no talk at the table for a good ten minutes after that, while they sop up their plates with heavy brown bread and finish with rice pudding, sweet with raisins.

  “I need you,” Dad blurts. “With Joel gone, well… I don’t know if I can do it without you.” He’s looking at her with his bleary, sad eyes.

  It’s the only time he’s ever asked her for help, maybe the only time he’s ever asked anyone for help. Sure, she’s had her chores, has taken part in operating the place since she was a kid. Now he’s asking for something else. He needs an heir.

  But she just gets up from the table and goes to her room to finish packing.

  The highway wasn’t as congested as it might be, at the end of summer like this. With Naomi asleep and nothing to distract Aglaia but the background music and crackles of lightning high on the horizon, she thought again about her mad midnight dash from the grasp of François Vivier. Had it really happened? She touched the pendant that still hung around her neck, the stone now warm as skin. She glanced at herself in the visor and saw the same flush on her cheeks that he must have seen when she fled, the besotted virgin befuddled.

  Steering with her knee, Aglaia unlatched the necklace hook and rolled the leather cord around the disc for protection before she tucked it into the outside pocket of her purse. She didn’t need anyone else’s curiosity making the situation even trickier than it currently was. Navigating whatever rough waters she’d find at the hospital would be difficult enough. So she fixed her eyes on what was seen rather than what was unseen—wires linking one telephone pole to the next along the miles of highway, round hay bales dotting the golden fields. It didn’t work: the poles became crucifixes and the bales bits of a giant’s breakfast cereal spilled into the basement of heaven.

  Naomi didn’t stir despite an ambulance that sped by them near Fort Morgan, and she slept through a cloudburst that left the pavement slick for miles. At last Aglaia picked up a financial talk show and drove the rest of the way half listening to advice on how to build a stock portfolio. It shut up the other voices.

  Naomi woke up as they rolled into Sterling, drowsy and apologetic over having missed the opportunity for a good visit on the drive down, over neglecting to ask Aglaia about Paris and now there was no time for that. She gave directions into the hospital parking lot.

  In the elevator, Aglaia controlled her gag reflex by swallowing a few times and breathing through her mouth until they reached the cardiac ward and entered the room, its blinds drawn against the light.

  “Tina, are you awake?” Naomi said softly as she bent like a daughter to the aging woman in the visitors’ chair.

  Aglaia hung back and studied her father, long and slim in the bed, his thinning hair now grey. His eyes were closed and his complexion was ruddy, at least below the cap line where the skin had been exposed for decades to the elements. His upper arms—and his shoulders under the hospital gown too, she knew—were stark white in contrast to the leathered hands, the sinewy forearms. She used to watch him strip off his shirt and wash his two-toned skin in the enameled basin Mom always set out on the porch at lunchtime, leaving behind him a filmy pool.

  Now Tina spotted Aglaia in the dim corner of the hospital room, and she fumbled for the hanky tucked in her sweater sleeve to mop at her eyes.

  Aglaia moved towards her and said, “It’s okay, Mom. I’m here.” She didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, but Tina seemed heartened, or heartening, as she patted Aglaia in a frail embrace.

  “Is he… ?”

  “He’ll be fine,” Tina said. “The doctors got the drugs into him fast and they say now it’s just a matter of time.” She gave her simplistic version of the medical goings-on before Henry opened his eyes, a jolt of blue like a field of blossoming flax.

  “Mary Grace,” he uttered, and held up his creased palm to her.

  “Daddy.”

  Don’t cry, she commanded herself, but she let him close his fingers around her hand, wishing for his arms to encompass her like they had when she was a small girl with night terrors.

  Suddenly she recalled being held like a child by Lou in her bed in Paris, and with clarity the nightmare of Joel’s death—the reality of Joel’s death. The horror of Joel’s death hit her like a boulder in the chest. She pulled away from her dad at that and stood before the window overlooking a stand of pine trees and an empty picnic bench. At her withdrawal, conversation ceased.

  Then Naomi piped up in a conversational tone, “So Henry, Byron and the boys are all set to finish off that eighty-acre field you have left.”

  “No,” he said. “You have your own crop to take care of.”

  “We can manage yours, too. You’d do the same for us. In fact,
you often have. It’s our turn, Henry. As for you, Tina,” she said, “don’t even think of leaving his side.”

  “Danke,” Tina said. “Mary Grace will help, won’t you, dear?”

  Help with the harvest? Her mother’s request was astounding, but all three of them stared at Aglaia.

  “What a great idea,” Naomi said. She beamed as though Aglaia had already agreed to come. “If the rain holds off and we don’t have any more breakdowns, it should only take us three days. Byron, Sebastian, and Silas can operate the two combines and our International grain truck”—she counted off the vehicles on the fingers of one hand and matched them with the family members on the other—“if you can handle Henry’s two-ton Chev. You still know how to shift gears on that dinosaur? No offense, Henry.” He grinned weakly and Naomi continued. “I’d offer to do the hauling, Aglaia, but that would leave you in charge of taking all the meals to the fields while tending the three girls and the baby. That would be too much for you.”

  The whole thing was too much for her! But Tina, working the soggy tissue over in her hands, regarded her daughter with welling eyes. Even Dad was watching her. It was no use bringing up her work schedule—she’d already told Naomi that she wasn’t expected back at Incognito on Monday.

  “I suppose I can spare a few days,” she said.

  Twenty-two

  By Aglaia’s watch, it was eleven o’clock on Sunday morning and already sheets of heat undulated over the standing grain. The wind swept the crop like a hand brushing velvet, swatted the clouds and a flock of skittering sparrows across the sky. Aglaia squinted through all the rushing movement and the truck’s dusty windshield to see if the combine at the far end of the field was ready for her to pick up another load. The wheat wasn’t spilling over the lip of the hopper yet; maybe she had a few more minutes to nap.

  She was still travel weary. The drive from the hospital yesterday ended when she and Naomi pulled into the Enns yard just before supper. Byron served them a casserole from the freezer, part of Naomi’s emergency supply, and went back out to work till sundown with the boys while the younger kids helped with the dishes. Naomi sent Aglaia to the top bunk in the girls’ room when she caught her yawning, and warned the kids not to giggle late into the night even though they’d be skipping Sunday school in the morning.

  Aglaia came to in the middle of night, wide awake, but forced herself to stay in bed until she dropped off again. Then she slept until eight, when Naomi awakened her to say that the crop’s moisture content finally allowed the beginning of the day’s harvest. She fed Aglaia what was left of a huge pan of rhubarb Plauts and filled her with coffee while Byron finished greasing and fuelling up the machinery. Naomi explained their plan for the day: While the boys finished swathing the Ennses’ northwest quarter, Byron and Aglaia would work together on the Klassen farmland.

  And here she was, waiting in the cab of the two-ton to haul another load, wearing jeans and t-shirt borrowed from Sebastian. She’d only caught sight of Naomi’s eldest child as he swung his slender frame up onto his tractor and drove off, his tow-headed brother Silas trailing behind in his truck. Nothing in her bag packed for Paris was suitable for fieldwork, and Naomi’s clothes were too big for her.

  “Just shift the stick into first gear and let the clutch out as you slowly step on the gas,” Byron had instructed this morning when she climbed behind the wheel of Dad’s Chev, parked in the Enns yard. It sounded simple enough but she stalled it several times before getting through the gate, and her ears were ringing and her hand was numb with the vibration of the gearshift before they made the few miles of gravel to the turn-off for her childhood home. But she was getting the hang of it by now, after hauling her first three loads. It was coming back to her.

  She saw Byron on his self-propelled combine at the other end of the field, waving for all he was worth. So she stomped down hard on the clutch and turned the key, and the truck engine hacked like an old smoker and she was off, bouncing across the stubble, the seat springs creaking. Byron motioned her into place alongside the moving combine until its spout was centered over her truck box, and she concentrated on keeping pace with his speed amidst the swirling grain dust and the roar of machinery.

  Aglaia trundled off to her parents’ yard then, and backed up close to one of the unpainted wooden granaries, tilting up the truck box. She was sweaty and itchy as she climbed down out of the cab, and she wiped her forehead with the back of the clumsy work glove. She fired up the clattering augur and forced open the trap door on the back of the truck box to allow the wheat to pour out onto the ground; the augur drew it up and dropped it in a torrent through the granary roof.

  Aglaia thought about how she’d climbed that roof when she was nine, wanting to touch the clouds. Her father thrashed her for the foolishness of it, and then clasped her close to his oil-stained shirt in a hug.

  Aglaia shrugged away the pain—not at Dad’s long-ago discipline but at her lack of self-discipline in keeping the memory at bay. There were too many memories here. Reluctantly she turned towards the farmhouse, overshadowed by the gnarled elm tree with a loop of sun-bleached rope still tied to its largest limb. The white lace curtains in the kitchen windows drooped like eyelids and the porch railing sagged, likely rotting. The house wore a morose expression now.

  But Aglaia’s childhood had been dominated by the pleasure of home, more at this time of the year than any other season, when the plentitude in the grain bins and her parents’ euphoria made her feel rich. Every autumn in the trustworthy rhythm of the seasons, when spring’s sowing had produced fall’s reaping, she celebrated with the family, and with the whole community, as they gathered in the church for the annual Schmeckfest, bringing platters of roast duck and pots of jellied pigs’ feet, tubs of cracklings and fried potatoes, and basins of pickled melon rind and steamed cabbage and two-layer buns baked with butter and milk.

  Now as she looked back at harvest through the lens of the Greek myths that had given her new perspective, she saw a pattern not evident to her more youthful eyes. Then, her father prayed thanks to the Lord for His kindness in giving rain from heaven and crops in their seasons and peace to fill their hearts. But now the cornucopia of her imagination brimmed with stories that repeated over and again themes of the power, the chaos, the caprice of the gods who ruled the heavens and earth in a non-ending cycle of self-serving sovereignty. They gave to humanity based on humanity’s sacrifice, with no kindness or grace in their begrudging, tyrannical provision.

  The augur had finished its work and Aglaia shut it down. It was a dangerous machine and she never operated it as a girl, busy enough with running the truck and taking meals out to the fields. Of course, in her teens she’d rather have worked at the local store stocking shelves or bagging groceries, but the village kids always got first dibs on those jobs.

  However, that summer—the summer Joel had spontaneously arranged for the student exchange without thinking ahead about how busy he’d be with Dad—she didn’t mind being at home to act as hostess for François. It fell to her to occupy him when the chores around the place were too complicated for his city skills. Dad said he was lazy, the way he sat around after meals sipping coffee or, propped on the tire swing with his heels dug into the sandy soil, picked on his guitar in the shade of the same elm still growing in the yard. She couldn’t have foreseen how that summer and that student would separate her from Joel.

  She determined right then to spend the night in her childhood bedroom with her memories, whether of François or Joel, rather than with the Enns family. The phantoms that drifted through an empty house were preferable to a baby crying half the night and the incessant queries of the girls during breakfast: Does the Eiffel Tower sway in the wind? Is it true that French children drink hot chocolate at breakfast? Only Naomi had been too busy to talk this morning, her hands in a batch of bread dough. But it was a long while yet before Aglaia’s first day of harvest would be done and she could sleep.

  At noon Naomi dropped off covered plates
of cabbage rolls at the field for Aglaia and Byron, bringing news that Henry was responding well to the treatment and that Tina managed to get some rest in the hospital lounge. The day wore on for Aglaia in dust and chaff and coughing until another break at suppertime, when the complete Enns family converged upon her.

  She sat with them on a blanket laid out on the prickly stubble, the field itself a laid-out blanket of golden corduroy with its even rows of swath in parallel lines stretching as far as she could see. Five rambunctious kids laughed and rough-housed around her, the baby was crying, and Naomi was unruffled by it all as she served out stewed beef, and cucumbers in sour cream, and bowls of simmered fruits.

  If Aglaia had been missing the gourmet cuisine of Paris, she still found herself stuffing her belly with all Naomi’s home cooking. Mennonite food wasn’t subtle, Aglaia thought in comparison—none of the fine herbs de Provence or the gruyère soufflé scented with a soupçon of cayenne. The ambience was all wrong, too, but somehow it didn’t matter at the moment.

  Aglaia’s farm relationships had always revolved around food—its production, preparation, consumption. This had been true through the generations of her family, true of her agricultural heritage that stretched back to Europe. Mothers taught daughters to cook and sons flattered wives for their efforts, so that the same recipes were passed around households bearing surnames like Friesen and Harder, Neufeld and Loewen, Unger and Toews and Dueck—names that branded families Mennonite like the name Vivier branded François French. Funny she hadn’t changed her last name too, Aglaia thought.

  The grueling work of the day so far left her grubby and wind burned. She was gulping another glass of whole milk when a young voice spat into her ear.

  “She’s cracking.”

  “Don’t talk with food in your mouth, Suzannah,” Naomi reprimanded.