by Rae Meadows
“Let me help with that,” she heard her father say.
“Thank you, Reverend,” the woman said, followed by a childish giggle. “It’s hard to zip it up myself.”
“You best get on your way now,” he said.
Confused and hot, Annie had rushed out of the hall, down the stairs, back outside. Mrs. Simpson, a wealthy widow who headed up the church’s women’s committee, emerged, blinking hastily against the day’s brightness, lifting her skirt away from the meltage underfoot. Her dark hair, piled high on her head, leaned to the side, and a hairpin dangled from it like a fishhook.
“Oh,” she said, seeing Annie, who pretended she had just arrived. “Hello there, Annie. I had to deliver what we collected for the poor Jameson family. Everyone was very generous.”
Mrs. Simpson’s cheeks were pink, and she swung a big empty basket as she descended the steps, the smell of rosewater in her wake.
The first flash of anger Annie felt was toward her mother. For the grooves on her face, her little puckered mouth and insipid voice, for somehow being responsible. Are you doing good by God, Mother, by pretending that you don’t see? Annie thought. She couldn’t then, not for a long while, accept that her father was not only just a man, but a fake.
Here she was, no better. A hawk circled above her. I am not weak, she thought, and stood, brushing off her dress, and turned to go home. But she heard an engine on the wind, and soon she saw that green Model A any of the neighbors would recognize coming toward her.
Jack Lily emerged into the fierce glare, his hair still damp from bathing, a nick on his chin. He stood in front of her with his hat in his hands. Dressed in a white shirt and a black tie as he often was, out here it made him seem like a visitor from another time.
“Annie.”
She tried to smile, but the heat bore down and her mouth felt heavy—for a moment she thought she might faint. He offered the crook of his arm and she took it, leaning into him, aware of how he felt different from Samuel, less muscled but more substantial. He smelled of soap and toothpaste. His hands were clean.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” he said.
“No one was home,” she said.
They walked up to the door, open and off one hinge, leaning against the house.
“We could drive somewhere. To Beauville. No one would recognize us there.”
“Samuel will be back before long.”
They stepped over the dried rabbit pellets and drifts of dust in the entryway. He took her hand and she was grateful to be led. At the sight of the old mattress on the floor, Annie knew there had been others here. She looked at Jack Lily, then surprised herself by laughing.
“The maid took the day off,” she said.
He laughed and folded her into his arms, and a hunger bubbled up in her, pushing away the guilt so that all she felt was the weight of a man who was not her husband pressed against her. Here was a man who knew about the world, who saw something in her, wanted her. Her body felt borrowed. She was not wife or mother or mender or cook or scrubber or canner or weeder. She did not have a husband who believed he had to build a boat in the desert. She did not have a baby who lived inside her for nine months and died outside after three. They had no history. It was almost too much, her breaths small and quick, and she felt she might pop.
“I have a blanket in the car,” he said. “So we can sit down.”
He jogged out and she stood motionless, closed her eyes against the dirty floor and broken doll’s head and the field mouse nest in the corner, and tried to leave herself behind.
When he returned, he pulled her to him and she was for a moment afraid of the need and gratefulness in his eyes, so she kissed him. How strange it was, she thought, this unfamiliar insistent mouth, the taste of another’s lips, tongue, and teeth. She kissed Jack Lily again and again with an abandon she never dared show Samuel.
He untied her bonnet and lifted it from her head.
“Annie,” he said. “Is this really you?” He pushed her hair back from her face and cupped her shoulders as if she might float away. He grinned and let out a small whoop, which made her laugh. She touched the small blood spot on his chin.
“I was nervous,” he said. “Not the best time to shave.”
She felt self-conscious then, for she knew she must look wilted after a morning pulling carrots and boiling bones.
“I’m sorry I didn’t freshen,” she said. “I would have liked to.”
He shook his head, kept shaking it, and smiled. “No need.”
He took her hands in his—soft hands, not working hands—and they stood in the middle of the near empty room. Annie glanced out the cracked window and in the distance were the locust trees Samuel had planted and the house he had built. That is there and this is here, she thought. Jack followed her gaze.
“Let’s sit,” he said.
He unfurled the quilt over the mattress and they sat side by side, their knees up awkwardly high. She wanted to loosen his tie, but didn’t want to suggest it.
“I heard about the rabbit hunt,” she said.
“Styron’s idea. I’m hoping no one shows.”
“I don’t know. I hear Win Johnson and his band are playing. Bessie Strom’s sewing up sacks.”
“Sacks?”
“So folks can carry home the meat.”
“Ah.”
“Fred is angry with me because I won’t let him go.”
Jack nodded. He had straightened at the mention of her boy and hoped she hadn’t noticed. He tried not to think past the afternoon, this moment of sitting close. Annie, here with him. It was astounding. He hoped his skin could contain his body’s exuberance—blood rushing, breath racing, heart boomeranging in his chest—so as not to frighten her. Slow, he told himself. Slow.
He had never felt this way with Charlotte. Her cool beauty had been intriguing, her father’s stature enticing, and Jack had been seduced by the trappings of what his life could look like. A beat reporter at the Daily News from the South Side when he met her, Charlotte Burkette, the only daughter of a publishing magnate who dabbled in whiskey running. He would be made an editor at the Herald Examiner, have a house on the shore. When she broke off the engagement, her hair newly cut into a severe flapper bob that didn’t suit her long face—“I’m sorry, Jack. You understand how my father is”—it was as if she were passing on a book he’d offered to lend her. No tears, no hint of sadness in those blue eyes beneath her thin arched brows. Only later could he admit he hadn’t loved her.
“Hello, Mayor,” Annie said.
She leaned in and kissed him again, and in a sudden rush he wanted all of her. He took her hand and kissed her fingertips, her nails edged in dirt. He gently pushed her back and she did not resist. He lay down beside her, unsure, all of a sudden, of what came next.
“You can take off your tie if you’d like,” she said.
But then came a voice from outside.
“Isn’t that the mayor’s car?”
It was Birdie. Annie shot up. Through the window she could see her daughter and Cy, the top of Birdie’s head not even reaching his big shoulders, and, mixed with her distress of being discovered was the sickening realization that Birdie and Cy had lain on the same mattress, her daughter who was not yet sixteen.
“I’ll go talk to them,” Jack Lily said.
“No!” Annie whispered.
“It’ll be okay.” His voice was gentle and firm and she believed him. He jumped up and jogged out, his feet quick on the steps.
“Let’s go,” she heard Cy say.
“Come on,” Birdie said. “What’s he going to do?”
“I thought I heard voices out here,” Jack said.
“Hi, Mr. Lily,” Birdie said.
“Sir.” Cy nodded.
“You know you’re not supposed to be out here, right?”
“Just out walking,” Birdie said.
Annie stood with her back to the wall beside the window. A mouse skittered by her feet. This was the toll then, t
his hiding and worry. Shame should have been enough to end it for good, but she was discovering she was not the woman she thought she was. The moment was over—she would go home as soon as it was safe to—but she would go to Jack Lily again because she knew now what he felt like, how her body hummed, and she would think of little else until then. She would avoid looking Samuel in the eye but she would hug him out of nowhere, leaving him slightly embarrassed but secretly pleased. While putting up the green beans she would imagine Jack coming up behind her and get too close to the hot water as it bubbled and she would blush when Samuel asked her how she got the burn on her arm. And later, when she realized she’d forgotten her apron in the bedroom of the crumbling house, she would vow to sneak back while her family slept.
“See you kids in church,” Jack Lily said.
Birdie dug at a rock with her toe. Cy tugged on Birdie’s hand.
“Tell your father I said hello,” Jack said to Cy. “I owe him a call.”
“Yes, sir.” Cy lifted his free hand in a wave.
“Bye, bye,” Birdie called over her shoulder. The mayor stood with his hands on hips watching them go.
“Come on now,” Cy said, pulling Birdie along down the path toward her house.
“What do you think he’s doing in there?”
“I don’t know. He’s the mayor. He can do whatever he wants.”
She looked over her shoulder.
“Think he knows what we were going to do?” she asked, elbowing him in his side.
Cy smiled and draped his long arm over her small shoulders. Her hip knocked into his leg as they walked. The sky was dark to the west, veined with dry lightning, and the air crackled around them.
“Dust or rain?” she asked.
“Hell if I know,” he said. “Don’t make a lot of difference.”
“What do you mean? ’Course it makes a difference.”
“Not for us. We mowed the big field. We said it couldn’t get any worse and then it goes and does.”
They kept walking and Cy didn’t say anything more for a half mile. Birdie wanted to make him feel better, pull him down right there and give herself to him. But there ahead was her father’s truck returning from town. She led Cy behind their barn and he pushed his body into hers, kissing her hard, rough, her backbone scraping against the timber wall.
“I love you, Birdie Bell. You know that, right?”
“I know that,” she said.
She heard the truck door slam shut.
“Come say hello to Pop. He wonders why you never come around.”
“I best be getting along.”
“See you at the rabbits, then?”
He nodded, turning away. He cut quickly back through the locust grove and out to the county road.
“Help me here, will you, Birdie?” Samuel called. His arms strained to hold up a bundle of wooden planks of different sizes. “Get the ends there.”
Birdie lifted the longer pieces and moved with him to the side of the barn. She yawned. She had been so tired lately she’d fallen asleep midday twice this week. She’d just sat down on a bale of hay out of eyeshot of her mother and nodded off. The dark clouds scuttled west without so much as a drop.
“Here’s fine,” he said, dropping the pile with a cascade of clacks. “That Cy I saw slinking off?”
“He just had to get back to work, is all. They mowed one of the fields. The big one.”
“That right?” Samuel whistled. “That doesn’t leave them much. Down half a herd, too.” He nodded to the cows foraging for fodder. “At least the disease hasn’t gotten them.”
“Are you building something?” she asked, pointing to the old lumber she was helping him unload.
“A steam box. You get wood all steamed up and it gets nice and pliable. Makes it so you can bend it.”
Birdie nodded, not really listening. She scanned the horizon but couldn’t make out Cy.
“Fred and me got ourselves a project,” he said.
“Okay, Pop.”
“Your mother home?”
“Haven’t seen her. I’m going to go wash up. I’ll call you in for supper.”
Inside the house, Birdie yawned and poured herself a glass of water from the kitchen sink. She listened for her mother or Fred but heard only the ticking of the spinning windmill and the groans of the settling house. She ducked into the bathroom and pulled down her underpants. Still nothing. The menstrual pad was lily white, as it had been for three weeks.
* * *
YELLOW STARBURSTS OF coreopsis, pink poppy mallow, lavender verbena, and white bell-flowered beardtongue. Blue morning glories and the fiery tendrils of mountain sage. Patches of green-leafed cowpeas with their waxy lavender blooms, and millet with its floppy bunched stalks, and the russet of broomcorn. Earth as rich as chocolate.
Golden ripe wheat. The kernels full and heavy on the stalks. The buzz of tractors day and night, the vibrations in his bones from the work, and the trucks back and forth to the granary, as fast as they could be loaded and unloaded. Feet burning through his boots on the hot metal of the combine platform.
That’s what Samuel remembered.
When the day had been done, and the last scatterings of grain had been swept up for chicken feed and the machines sat quiet and the prickly chaff was rinsed from his sweaty and spent body and the mourning doves cooed from their hollows, he would lay his proud self down on clean sheets and sleep like the dead.
Now the drifts of silt blotted out all the colors of the prairie. We swallow hard, he thought. We give away another load of wheat for twenty-one cents a bushel, less than the cost of production. We huddle from the furious skies. We wince when we trade a whole bushel for an oil-stove wick, twelve dozen eggs for a pair of overalls, five gallons of milk for a pair of work gloves. Jenkins breathes in the stink as he gathers cow chips from the pasture for fuel. The men in suits come and take away everything Astor has, down to the false teeth he hasn’t paid out on.
Samuel had heard the men down at Ruth’s, who’d been able to scrape a few pennies together for a splash of whatever Ruth might have to offer, their desperation shoved to the side for the slimmest of moments. They laughed and coughed and nursed the last in their glasses until Ruth shooed their jaw-flapping selves out to flounder home to angry wives and broken-down fields and all the hours of wait. The choice was California or WPA, and $22 a month couldn’t hardly hold a family.
We stay, Samuel thought, because we remember how it was.
* * *
FRED FILLED A bucket with rodent bones and added them to his collection. He dug out a cow femur half-buried in a drift of sand and the exertion brought on a spasm of coughing he couldn’t shake. His chest felt constricted, a belt cinched around his lungs. It was all the time now, this hard work of breathing, and he tried to tell himself it was getting better, that maybe it wasn’t as bad as yesterday. If he didn’t run and stayed away from the cattle and went inside when the dust was up, he could manage. He had to rest up for the rabbit hunt. He was set on going. All those bones! And all the boys were going with their slingshots and bows and arrows and he didn’t want to be left out, even if he’d never been that kind of boy.
After a spell the coughing subsided, and he decided to take a detour to the Woodrows’ place on the way home. He hadn’t been back since the run-in with the scavengers, and he wanted another look. The sole of his right shoe was coming loose and it flapped like a mouth as he walked. He wondered if glue would hold it, or maybe a rubber band. The soapweeds’ spearlike leaves scratched his bare legs. He stopped and pulled apart the petals of one of the few flowers, loosing the yucca moth vibrating inside. At night the flowers would open and moths would fly out into the darkness in search of other soapweed flowers in which to lay eggs and pollinate. Fred had a sudden urge to pop open each flower and pluck out the moths, but he let them be. “So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is a sin,” his father was fond of reciting. Fred walked on.
The roof of the Woodrow pl
ace sagged in the middle like the body of an old mule. Critters had moved in, taking up shelter in various nooks and corners, and spiders had taken over the bathtub where water no longer ran through the pipes. He crunched over dust-buried glass in the kitchen and found a box of matches under the sink, which he slipped into his pocket. His shoe slapped against the stairs, which set off a click click click of little clawed feet somewhere above him. In the old children’s bedroom, the mattress had been dragged nearer to the window and the room had been swept with the broom now leaning against the doorframe. He suspected Birdie and Cy came here, though he didn’t really understand what they might be doing. And then he saw on the floor, half underneath the mattress, familiar faded red gingham. He held up the apron. The red square patch and the embroidered yellow “A” in the corner. It was his mother’s. How it had gotten there, he had no inkling.
But he was sure she would be happy he had found it.
CHAPTER 6
I am not pregnant, Birdie thought. I am fifteen and eleven months old and I am going to marry Cy and we will leave the wind and dust and go west to where it’s green or to a big city like St. Louis where we’ll ride streetcars and go to clubs where people play jazz music and smoke cigarettes and I’ll wear lipstick in a color like poppy red.
She hadn’t told Cy because each day she thought maybe the blood would start tomorrow and there was no reason to worry him. She thought it was her fault somehow. Really she hadn’t thought about getting pregnant at all. Cy never said anything about it either. He had slid her green ribbon between the pages of his Bible, and that was enough for her. How weird, Birdie thought, that lying with a boy and having a baby were connected. They didn’t feel like they should be the same thing at all.
She cleaned out the troughs and shoveled the shit and spread the hay—already dipping into winter stores—and then she drew a bath, not bothering to heat the kettle to warm it. She lowered herself into the cold, dust-rimmed water.
God makes no sense, she thought. He took baby Eleanor, whom her mother wanted, and gave other people babies that they didn’t. She stared at her abdomen and willed the blood to appear. Please, God, make the blood come.
