by Rae Meadows
She sat up and pulled on her underthings. As she buttoned up her blouse, she saw one of the buttons had cracked and another was missing. She’d have to find some replacements. There were no new clothes now, only the mended and remended.
He laced his fingers with hers, and then lifted her hand to kiss it. His eyes went back to the window. Birdie recognized his searching look. She’d seen it in her father, in the other farmers. Worry had reeled him out of the room.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“We lost two head of cattle, this last one. The others are sucking air. Wobbly on their legs.” He let go of her hand and sat up. “Things aren’t going so good.”
How he could think of cows when they’d barely just caught their breath was beyond her. She scooched closer to him where the mattress was dry.
“It’ll take them a while to clear it out. They’ll be okay.” She patted his arm, but he didn’t look at her. What did it matter, she wondered, when they would go away, start somewhere else together soon. A porch swing and honeysuckle and big, leafy trees.
“And that patch we worked to save after the first one? Gone. Done.” He rubbed the sides of his face with his hands. “I don’t know, Birdie. It’s a lot.”
She was so sick of hardship. She just wanted life to return to regular. The last storm had taken two more hens and her mother’s pole beans and had buried most of the wheat shoots in the east field. She knew the government was paying a dollar a head to kill starving and sick cows, although it made her squirm to think of it. Can’t sell them so they shoot them instead. Everyone was losing everything. It was awful. It was boring.
“You got me, right?” She pounced on his chest and knocked him back, wanting to shake him out of it, wanting to be enough to change his mood.
“Right-o,” he said, planting a kiss on her forehead. He sat up again and pulled on his overalls. “We best be getting on. It’s late.”
She knew he was right, but it dug at her still. A wolf spider made its way across the floor. She stood and zipped her skirt, felt a rush of dampness in her underpants.
“We’ll live somewhere else,” she said, surprised by the resolve in her own voice. “Someday. Away from here.” She wasn’t too concerned with the details. She would work in a café in a town near the beach. Or she would see Cy off to work each morning and pick fresh flowers for the dinner table. Away, away, was all that mattered. Like Ann of the Airlanes in the radio show she used to love, “over valley and mountain, river and plain,” buzzing about as the world spun.
Cy nodded, but busied himself with tying his boots. “Sure we will. It’ll be good.”
He smelled of dirt and hay and sweat and she leaned into his big warm chest. He held her hair in his fist, and a kiss to her neck sent a jolt to her toes.
“Maybe we should live on a boat,” she said.
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
“And listen to the water all day long.”
“And sleep under the stars.” Cy put his heavy hands on her shoulders and shook her gently. “I have to go.”
“I know.”
Hand in hand they walked out into the arid evening. To the west the sun cast its copper glow on the barren remains of the Woodrow farm.
“Glad school’s out?” he asked.
“What do you think?”
“I saw Miss Francis in town yesterday. Looks like she’s still a nervous Nellie.”
“On the last day she teared up because Billy Trotter threw an eraser at Tom McGuane but it hit her by accident and left a white rectangle of chalk on her backside.”
“I never thought I’d miss it. But I do sometimes.”
Cy wagged his head and looked away. He was only a year out of school, but it might as well have been ten.
“It’s a large backside. It’s kind of hard to miss,” she said.
He laughed and latched his thumbs on his pockets. “See you soon, Birdie girl.”
In his mind Birdie was like sunshine, the early spring kind that got the chickens laying and the robins nesting and coaxed the grass green. Or used to. What do people do when there’s nothing left to farm, nothing left to eat? Cy felt his stomach seize. Lately he’d been saving some of his dinner for his sister, who got last dibs. He took measured breaths and steps, his boots sliding in the dust. He couldn’t stop for fear that Birdie was still watching. Birdie wasn’t the kind of girl you could tell your troubles to. She was like a swift sparkling creek, flowing right over the sharp rocks to a place where the current ran smooth.
It calmed him to think of it, him and Birdie running off somewhere like she talked about, to think of her beside him. He pictured them on a train, an open boxcar, with rucksacks and apples in their hands. But he didn’t have a rucksack and neither did she and she was fifteen, a schoolgirl still, and there was his father and mother and sister and the dying cows and the dying land. He was a son first.
* * *
STEP, STEP, STEP, hop. Step, step, step, hop. “Look out, hoppers,” Fred thought. “You better scatter while you can, because here I come, a giant boy with a sack of poison bait.” He didn’t really want to kill the grasshoppers, but he did what his father asked. Fred coughed and his breath felt grainy; the air was getting a little stuck on the way in and then again on the way out. When he ran, his lungs were heavy like sponges full of water. It annoyed him to have to walk all the time.
Even if he washed his hands twice, the stink of grasshopper bait still clung to them. Pop said the bait didn’t do much, so Fred didn’t know why they kept putting it out, but he couldn’t ask him and it didn’t seem worth it to write out all the words. So he did what he was told even if he got bored and took a break to follow tracks that could be bear tracks that led to a secret forest where the shade was cool and dark and smelled like moss and toadstools.
He heard his mother calling him in.
* * *
BIRDIE WAITED UNTIL Cy had disappeared over the drift of sand east of Woodrow’s before running for home. By the time she rounded the fence she saw the sun going low and she knew she was late for dinner again. She stopped outside the front door, trying to settle herself, make sure her buttons were done up right, her skirt straight. She brushed her hair with her fingers, fishing out a twig.
“Where you been at?” Samuel said as she opened the door.
Her parents and Fred sat around the table, the stew and boiled potatoes untouched in the middle.
“Answer your father, Barbara Ann.”
“Out walking,” she said.
Fred made a kissing face across the table as she sat. She scowled at him and reached for a piece of cornbread as she sat.
“Birdie,” Samuel said, his voice harsh. “We will say grace.”
She looked down at her plate; a fine gray layer was already settling on the white porcelain. Even when the sky was clear, the dust never left them. There was no such thing as clean.
“Bless us, O Lord, and these, your gifts, which we are about to receive from your bounty. Through Christ, our Lord. Amen.” Her father kept his eyes squeezed shut even after “Amen,” and Fred kicked Birdie’s foot under the table.
Annie folded her napkin in her lap and watched her husband’s face, his eyes tight, his mouth twitching. It was irksome to her, how he held them captive after the prayer. And there her daughter was, running in from doing who knew what with Cy Mack and making them all wait.
Samuel cleared his throat and picked up the stew pot, exposing a white ring on the tablecloth. In the last storm, with Annie stuck in town, Samuel and the children had hung wet sheets over the windows to keep out the dust, but even in the house they still inhaled it with each breath, cobwebby in their noses.
“Looks wonderful,” Samuel said.
“At least we’ll always have potatoes,” she said. “Elbows off the table, Fred.”
He grunted, a yes of a kind, one of his few noises. Annie didn’t pray anymore, but sometimes she would stare at Fred and try to will him to speak. Talk to me, she said to herself, you can
talk to me. She already knew his voice, heard it in her head whenever he wrote.
Birdie pushed around a carrot with her fork before nibbling on a square of cornbread. Annie spied a mark on her daughter’s neck, even obscured as it was by her hair. For now, Annie held her tongue. Gathered there with her family, she couldn’t help think of her own transgression. She bowed her head.
When the storm had hit, what followed her initial fear was the undeniable thrill of Jack Lily’s confident hand leading her to the closest parked car. Inside they had huddled side by side in the backseat as the car was rocked by gusts, dust scratching against the windows. They breathed into the crooks of their elbows. When she realized they were still holding hands, she didn’t pull away. The heat of the car, stifling, flushed her cheeks.
“Thank you,” she said, when the wind subsided. Light filtered through the haze and she returned her hand to her lap.
“Annie.”
Dust had coated his hair and shoulders like talcum powder, but there he was, smiling. She couldn’t help smiling, too.
“I suppose I can make it to the car now,” she said.
“Maybe best not to drive quite yet.”
She knew it was probably fine—she was not some delicate rose, and the worst of the storm had passed—but she stayed, she wanted to stay, and she was glad to have the pretext. Who am I? she wondered as her heart drummed its erratic beat beneath her rib cage. Jack Lily had crisp brown eyes, steady and direct, and black hair that hung boyishly across his forehead. He was younger than she was by a few years, she guessed, but he was sophisticated, knew about a different kind of life. She was drawn to this man, liked the excitement she felt next to him. She had stayed sitting close.
“You hear that?” Samuel asked.
“What?” Flustered, Annie sipped her milk.
“Fred. When he breathes. There’s a whistle.”
Fred exhaled theatrically, and a wheeze constricted the tail end of his breath.
“Be serious,” Birdie said.
He laughed silently and did it again. He had always had fragile lungs; his colds would settle in his chest and last for a month, with a tight barking cough that yanked Annie from sleep like the blast of a shotgun. Some things helped a little. Hot water and honey. Steam. That the dust was taking its toll she could hear now in his ragged-edged breathing.
“Feel okay, Freddie?” she asked.
The doctor over in Herman cost five dollars for the visit alone.
“The boy has asthma,” the doctor had said last year when they took him. The liniment oil in his wavy dark hair made his collar greasy. “Pull down his trousers.”
Annie didn’t know what asthma was and didn’t care just then. She did as she was told and whispered into Fred’s ear, “It’s okay. The doctor is going to help you.” Fred had smiled even through his strangled breaths. Her good boy Fred.
The doctor jammed a syringe of epinephrine into Fred’s thigh, and he shot up to sitting, shaking and sweating, but breathing.
“Doctor? What can we do for him?” Samuel asked.
“They say it’s a psychosomatic illness.”
“Psychosomatic?” Samuel asked.
“In his head. Psychological causes. Fear, stress, feelings of hopelessness perhaps. From the Greek verb aazein, meaning to pant.”
Annie hated this man, his condescension. She ran her palm over her boy’s clammy forehead.
“He couldn’t breathe,” Samuel said thinly.
“Oh, the symptoms are real. But most likely brought on by some strong emotion. Something upsetting you, son?”
Fred looked to his mother, confused.
“He can’t speak,” she said.
“Can’t or won’t?” the doctor said.
Annie felt Samuel squeeze her hand, and she half hoped her husband would up and knock the doctor down.
“Well. Nothing much to be done, I’m afraid, except watch for symptoms. And don’t let it get this bad before getting him help.”
The doctor turned to Fred. “Tell your folks if it gets hard to breathe, okay?” He had leaned down close to Fred’s face. “You can do that, can’t you? I’m pretty sure you can.”
And that had sent Annie spinning.
Birdie reached for her third piece of cornbread. “I’m sure he’ll be just fine with a plateful of sugar cookies and strawberry preserves,” she said.
“Nothing your mother’s cookies can’t fix.” Samuel grinned.
His compliment nettled her, so easy and bland. As she and Jack Lily had waited in the hot backseat, the light diffuse through the dirty windshield and cloudy air, she had felt outside of time, transported. Like someone else.
“I sure wouldn’t have imagined myself here in No Man’s Land,” Jack said with a laugh.
She found she loved his voice, smooth and clear, laced with bits of his Chicago accent. They caught glances and turned away.
“Who would have?” she said. “I hoped Mr. Darcy would find his way to Kansas.”
Jack Lily raised his eyebrows. “Austen?”
She reddened, caught showing off with the little she remembered from high school English.
“You are lovely,” he said.
And there it was.
Annie stared straight ahead. She felt electric.
“I should go,” she said, avoiding his eyes. She touched her fingertips to the scowl lines between his eyes before opening the door.
Her hat had been caught, wedged under the car’s front tire, crushed. She had done nothing and she had done everything.
* * *
FRED HAD KNOCKED his glass of milk to the floor with one of his unruly elbows.
“Get a towel, Fred,” Samuel said.
“I’ll get it,” Annie said, leaping to her feet.
He would never suspect. Never be jealous.
“No use crying over spilled milk,” Birdie said. Fred stuck his tongue out at her.
“I’m going over to the Macks’ place after supper,” Samuel said. “He’s got a bunch of sick cows. Needs to figure out what to do.”
“Is there anything to do?” Annie asked as she sopped up the milk.
“I think he’ll take the dollar a head. They herd them over to Fairview gulch.”
Annie looked up. “It’s awful.” All of it, she thought.
“Don’t I know it.”
* * *
ANNIE HANDED BIRDIE the last pot to dry, and took a rag to wipe down the table.
“You were with Cy. Earlier.”
Birdie silently dried the already dry pot.
“Birdie.” Annie turned to face her. “Barbara Ann.”
“What?”
“Don’t go sneaking around.”
“I’m not sneaking.” Birdie shoved the pot on the high shelf until it clanged against the wall.
Annie pushed the hair from her forehead, that stubborn curl that never stayed back. “It’s becoming,” Jack had said in the car, “how it always falls like that.”
“You think you know everything there is to know, Birdie.” She knew it was the wrong thing to say, but she couldn’t help herself.
Birdie crossed her arms and clamped her lips together. “So you’ve said before,” she muttered.
Annie took a breath, evened her voice, and tried to start again.
“Cy’s a farmer like his father,” Annie said.
“So what? You married a farmer.”
I know I did, Annie thought. I know, I know. Jack in his rolled-up shirtsleeves. His clean cut-grass-and-mint smell.
“I’m not saying a farmer is a bad thing,” Annie said, lowering her voice. “I chose this life.”
“Besides, Cy doesn’t want to stay here forever. You don’t know anything about him.”
“I know that you like him. And that’s a wonderful thing. But you don’t need to decide on someone yet. You’re only fifteen.”
“You don’t know what it’s like,” Birdie said, her voice gone quiet. She bit her lip and shook her head, giving up trying to explain it.<
br />
I do know what it’s like, Annie thought.
“Be a little careful with your heart. That’s all I’m saying,” she said.
“I’m not like you, Mama.”
I’m not like me, either.
* * *
FRED WATCHED HIS father set off toward the Mack farm, his steps quiet in the dust, and then the car chugging down the driveway, finally small against the horizon. The evening brought a light breeze, the clouds plum in the west. He would have liked to go along, but he had not been invited. He jumped off the porch and ran behind the chicken coop to check his trap, which he’d fashioned from an old crate. If it worked, a rabbit would hop in through the door he’d cut, nibble at the piece of cabbage—stolen from his mother’s garden—and the movement would knock loose a gate of chicken wire, which would fall and capture it. He didn’t know what he’d do with it after he caught it, but maybe he could fashion a leash out of twine.
Fred panted, unable to get a breath in deep. He came around the henhouse to find the crate knocked over and the cabbage gone. This was his third failed contraption. He wandered toward what was left of the old grazing land around the dry pond to look for bones. There was a bone market out near the railroad, bone meal being the cheapest way to fertilize. They paid by the ton, he’d heard, and he was pretty sure he was getting there now that there were all kinds of bones to be found: coyotes, rabbits, birds, bats, raccoons, squirrels. He’d hauled a whole cow skeleton, piece by piece, from the middle of what was left of the pond. His pile of bones formed a white tower in the dying light.
He picked up a cow skull, heavy in his hand, still warm from the day’s heat. He hurled it with both hands as hard as he could at the lone cottonwood on the pond’s edge. The crack of breaking bone felt clean and good. He gulped in a not-quite-full breath and yawned.
Sugar cookies would make him feel better. Birdie was right. He scampered off, in the direction of home.
