by Rae Meadows
FRED’S TEMPERATURE HAD come down some, but when the coughing came on, spasms overtook him until he spat phlegm like mud into the bucket next to the bed. The curtains were pulled against the sun and a fan was aimed directly at the bed. As ice and sweat wet the bedclothes, Annie changed them, rolling Fred from side to side. After he had slept, she propped him up and fed him some beef broth, which he sipped eagerly. On his tablet he wrote, “Look out for birds,” and then pointed to the ceiling.
“Birds?”
“Flying low,” he wrote, and pointed again.
He was still delirious from the fever, his eyes like embers. There was a small part of her that liked taking care of him like this, as if he were still her baby boy. She ducked her head and he nodded.
“What color are they?” she asked.
“Blue orange,” he wrote.
“They’re quite lovely,” she said. “Pretty little wings.”
Fred laid his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes.
“Freddie?”
He opened his eyes and lifted his eyebrows in response.
“Do I have you to thank for finding my apron?”
He smiled and nodded. He pointed in the direction of the Woodrow house.
“Yes,” she said. “I must have left it there when I went to have a look at the place.”
If her answer had been vague, it seemed to work for Fred, who wasn’t suspicious to begin with. She patted his hand, feeling unclean about the lie, but relieved nonetheless.
From the direction of the barn came the sounds of a hammer on nail and wood. She had not asked Samuel about the boat since their argument; she thought—hoped—he might come to his senses and forget the whole thing.
She tried to pinpoint why Samuel’s obsession riled her so. Because they lived in a veritable desert and even when it did rain again it could never rain enough to raise a boat from the ground? Or was it that they used to decide things together, but now he was going ahead with the boat without her? They’d built a life side by side: Should we buy the tractor? I’ll hold the team while you work on it. Do you like this dress? What do you think? Let’s call her Birdie. I think you’re right about more wheat. What do you think is best? We will be fine. Hold my hand.
But now he would not listen to reason; her voice did not matter.
She was, she realized, frightened by this turn in Samuel. And there was the mayor, like balm.
At the window she pulled back the curtains and saw a light on in the barn, the glow of sundown behind it. There was a knock at the door.
“How is he?” Birdie popped her head in and then came and sat next to Fred on the bed.
“Fever’s down some. Got a little broth in.”
“I took care of the chickens.” Birdie yawned. “You can tell him when he wakes up.”
Birdie’s face had begun to thin out as she neared sixteen. She was—Annie had the sudden melancholy realization—no longer her girl. She had hoped her daughter might go to college, might go further than she herself had gone. Annie was afraid Birdie had already cast her lot with Cy, waiting to be asked to be a wife.
“I set an egg pie to bake if you’re hungry,” Annie said. “Your father will come in to eat sometime soon.”
“I’ll check on it.” Birdie scanned her fingernails.
“Are you feeling better?” In the commotion of the last two days, Annie had forgotten that Birdie had gotten sick at the rabbit hunt. “You look a little peaked.”
“I’m fine,” she answered hastily. She stood and dug at one thumbnail with another, fidgeting on her feet. “Just the heat was all.”
Fred stirred and he was at once racked with coughs. Birdie patted his back and wiped his mouth when the spell subsided. He fell back to sleep.
“Birdie?”
“Yes, Mama.”
“How is Cy?”
“He’s okay, far as I know.”
“Are you—”
“What?”
“In love?” Annie could barely get the words out, her voice gone small and husky, flustered as she was by such frank talk.
Birdie sat back down with a heavy plop onto the bed beside Fred.
“I love him. And he loves me.”
Annie couldn’t ask further, afraid of the asking and of the answer.
Last fall Birdie had walked all the way to town, six miles, and back, because she’d wanted to make oatmeal raisin cookies and she needed the raisins. She wanted what she wanted, not one for temperance. Part of Annie couldn’t help admiring her for it, but she feared her daughter’s impulsiveness. Birdie had always been headstrong, and Annie guessed there was little she could say about Cy to make much difference. New bodies together were not easily cooled.
Annie glanced at Fred, panting in sleep.
“You know I was supposed to marry someone else,” she said.
A hint of a smile pulled at Birdie’s mouth.
“Instead of Pop?”
Annie nodded. “His name was William Thurgood. I was barely older than you are when we began courting.”
“What did he look like?” Birdie leaned eagerly forward.
“Dark hair. Serious Scots-Irish eyes. He was to be a minister like my father. He always had these little peppermints in his pocket. His father owned a mill outside of Bentonville. They had the nicest house in town. They had a maid who wore a black dress and a white apron.” Annie laughed. “Can you imagine?”
“I wish we had a maid,” Birdie said. “What happened?”
“He seemed right, I liked him, but he didn’t make me excited for the future. And then I met your father.” Annie gathered the fabric of her skirt like an accordion and then smoothed it out over her knees. “The first one is not always the right one.”
“Mama, Cy is the right one. For me,” Birdie said, resolute.
“Barbara Ann, you don’t know enough about life yet to know!”
They were both startled by the rise in her voice. Birdie stood. Her eyes twitched and sparkled in the lamp’s glow.
“I know Cy. And when I see him I feel like I could burst. I don’t need to know any more than that.”
And with that she spun around and flounced out of the room.
Annie’s heart felt like a handful of sand as she stared at the space her daughter had left. Oh, Birdie, she thought. Even with all that teenage bravado, there was a sliver of vulnerability she couldn’t hide. I was you once, Annie thought. I know, I know.
It had been the cusp of spring, the late afternoon light pale through the bare tree branches, the wrens in a dither. Annie had come upon her mother nibbling a biscuit with her tea, a copy of The Lady’s Realm on the table in front of her. She had worked up her nerve, finally, to face her mother, but she had also wanted to shock, wanted to proclaim herself.
“I’m going to marry him,” she said.
Her mother placed her teacup carefully back on its saucer.
“You cannot marry a sharecropper.”
“He’s going to have his own farm. We will.”
“What do you know of farming, Annie?”
“I can learn.”
“Life is hard without you trying to make it harder. William Thurgood—”
“I love Samuel.”
“Love.” Her mother sniffed and her gaze grew vague. “There’s more to it than that.”
Annie felt her anger crackle behind her eyelids. For you, maybe, she wanted to scream. Do you know what love is? That hot and tangled knot at her throat. Her life had felt like a dim hallway until Samuel had come along and the walls teetered over and there was space and light.
Everything about her mother was small: her feet, her hands; even her teeth looked to Annie like baby teeth.
“Your father won’t give his approval.”
“I’m eighteen, Mother.”
“You are the reverend’s daughter. You are not some country girl.” Her mother rose from her chair.
“What does that matter when he makes me happy?”
There was an adjustment her mother made then,
a slight giving in, a relaxing of her shoulders, as if she wondered for just a moment what that kind of freedom might feel like. She sat down, though, and turned away to wipe a trace of fingerprint from the window, her face impassive as a doll’s.
“Where will you live?” she asked, not looking at Annie.
“Oklahoma. They’re giving away homesteads.” Annie couldn’t stop herself from smiling a little as she said it. The adventure of it.
“They only give away what’s worthless to begin with,” her mother had said. And that had been the end of it.
Why couldn’t she tell Birdie she understood what it was like? Annie wondered. Because the words would come out flat and wooden, as they always did now when she tried to talk to her daughter, their meaning, intention, lost in the space between them. As hard as it was for Annie to accept, maybe Birdie was right about what she knew, what she felt for Cy. Could it be, she thought, that what Birdie needs is different from what I think she needs? Samuel had once made her burn for all the next days. It didn’t matter how difficult she knew they would be. She went to the window again, the light in the barn a beacon in the twilight.
Could she feel that way again with Samuel? She could swallow her sin deep and return to the man she had vowed to love.
Go to him, she told herself. Go to your husband.
* * *
SAMUEL KNEW NOTHING about boats, had never even been on one. The closest he’d come was a beached rowboat he’d helped pull in from the Cimarron. The ark Noah had constructed was an enormous boxy cargo vessel built to withstand storms on the open seas. Samuel just needed a boat for the four of them, and maybe a couple of animals. Would he need sails? A motor? Fred had given him more books from the library, and Samuel studied them, sitting in the tractor. What angle of transom? How long a body? He got down on his knees and closed his eyes, prayed for guidance.
Day by day, he told himself. God will provide. With Fred, with the boat, with the farm. He focused on finishing the steam box first. The temperature inside needed to reach 212 degrees. He attached an aluminum gasoline can to one end of the box to force the steam in. Once a piece of wood is steam-bent into shape, he read, it’ll be less likely to crack as it bends. Steam the wood until it’s wobbly.
It was time to check on Fred. And his hunger yowled. Samuel rubbed his eyes in the too-warm alcove. He’d put up the modest post-and-beam barn with the help of Stew Mack and a few of the other farmers when they still lived in the dugout, when all that existed of the house was a foundation. Wheat first. They plowed with horses in those days, and the gambrel roof gave him plenty of room for the mow. The old tack room was where he now kept his tools, and it still smelled vaguely of horses. He tidied up his work area, hanging up his hammer and saw, sweeping out the sawdust.
Outside the stars made a fierce spray of light.
“Samuel?” The mayor closed his car door. “Hope I didn’t startle you. It’s later than I intended.”
“Jack, is that you?” He walked closer to the car, and the two men shook hands.
“I’m awfully sorry about Fred. I feel terrible about what went on.”
“I don’t have any blame for you. It’s the dust that done it. Why don’t you come on in? Have you eaten?”
“That’s mighty kind, but I can’t stay. How’s he doing?”
“He’s sleeping in between fits of coughing. But Ann said the fever’s down a little. The doc said keep him away from dust.” Samuel shook his head at the idea. “Thought about sending him and Ann to Kansas, to stay with her folks for a while.”
Jack Lily swallowed hard and kept his gaze steady. “They going to go?”
“She wouldn’t hear of it. Can’t stand her mother. Besides, Kansas is near as dusty as Oklahoma now.”
Jack hung his head. “It’s a hell of a thing.” He wasn’t sure whether he meant that he loved the wife of a good man, the interminable drought, the bedridden boy, or all of it.
* * *
ANNIE WALKED STRAIGHT downstairs and out the door into the darkness. She heard her husband’s voice before she could see him, and then her eyes adjusted and there he was and there was Jack Lily standing with him, hat in hand. The sight of these two men standing together in the milky light was enough to make her woozy. She reached for the banister on the front steps and gripped it tight.
“I can’t get the mayor to stay for supper,” Samuel said. “I tried.”
“Just here to see how you all were doing,” Jack said.
She found his eyes before she found Samuel’s and her resolve faltered.
“You should stay,” she said. She’d spoken so quietly she wasn’t sure he’d heard her. If only Samuel would take her hand, she thought. That might be enough to lead her back. But he didn’t reach for her, and she couldn’t reach for him.
* * *
BIRDIE SAT IN the dark in the broken-backed chair behind the house, the one her mother used for peeling potatoes or shucking corn or standing on to get the sheets on the clothesline, and looked out at the vast expanse of nothingness. Her breasts ached. Dear God, she whispered. Dear God. She heard her father talking but couldn’t make out the other low voice. Cy has come, finally, she thought. Cy would make it better. She rose quickly and walked around the edge of the house, stumbling on a clot of dirt. But as she neared, the voices grew sharper. She heard the mayor speak and then her mother. It was not Cy. She stopped and leaned against a wall of the house. The clapboard siding, abraded from the dust storms, stuck and snagged her dress, but she didn’t care enough to move.
“I’m okay,” Jack said. “But thank you.”
Birdie remembered how he’d been at the Woodrow house, chatty and evasive and eager to move them along. Could he have been hiding a woman up there? The mayor? It seemed unlikely but one never knew. So many secrets.
“I’m going back in to Fred,” her mother said. “Evening, Mayor.”
“Oh, before you go. I wanted to tell you both. I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
“What’s happened?” Samuel asked.
“The Macks. They left.”
“Left?” Samuel asked.
“For California, I guess. The whole family.”
Birdie pressed her lips together and dragged her palms across the rough wood behind her. There was nowhere for her shock to settle, a slow-motion spinning as the realization rose up and throbbed behind her eyes. She sat down in the weeds and tried to feel the splinters burrowing into the pads of her hands, but the pain was not enough.
She felt like the crushed petals of a violet, dark and limp. No, no, no. She bit her knuckle until she tasted blood.
Cy was gone.
CHAPTER 8
“A preacher and a soap maker go a-walking. After a ways the soap maker turns to the preacher and says, ‘Look at the world. All the trouble and misery. Such sin and sadness, even after so many years of teaching about goodness. If religion is good and right, why should this be?’”
Pastor Hardy paced in front of the congregation. There was a pulpit, but he never lasted long behind it. It was a plain church without stained glass, unadorned but for a large oak crucifix above the sanctuary.
Mrs. Turner turned to listen, sitting at the church’s small fold-up organ, a gift from a pair of Swedish missionaries who had passed through town. Pastor Hardy’s wife had been the organist back in Arkansas, and he missed her acutely whenever Mrs. Turner—her small spidery hands—would play the opening chords of “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” or “Abide with Me.” A warmth would travel up his spine and then fly off, leaving him more lonesome than ever. In front of his flock, he sometimes could feel the abyss of despair open beneath him. He feared these moments and felt the hand of the devil in them.
“The preacher says nothing. They keep walking,” Pastor Hardy said. He stopped and looked from face to hungry face. As the drought wore on, his people had thinned and aged, desperate for succor.
“They walk until the preacher sees a child playing in the dirt. The preacher says to the soap make
r, ‘Look at that child. You say that soap makes people clean, but see the dirt on that boy. What good is soap? With all the soap in the world, the child is still filthy. I wonder how effective soap is after all.’
“The soap maker stops. ‘But preacher,’ he says, ‘soap cannot do anything unless it is used.’”
Pastor Hardy nodded and touched his temple. “And you know what that preacher says? He says, ‘Exactly.’”
Samuel Bell smiled. The Bells sat, as they did every Sunday, in the third pew. Pastor Hardy was glad to see Fred in attendance even though, behind his mask, he looked sickly. The pastor had not attended the rabbit slaughter, thankfully, but he was saddened to hear about the violence. Killing animals for food was one thing. A bloody frenzy was quite another.
“Faith requires action. Let me say that again. Faith requires action. It doesn’t take much to listen. Listening to the Word is not enough.”
There were a few murmured assents in the audience. Samuel nodded.
“Listen to what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father.’ Not all who profess themselves Christians shall be saved.” He stopped pacing. “Who among us is ready to heed the call?”
The congregation sat silent.
“I said, Who is ready to heed the call of our Blessed Savior?”
“I am,” came the weary reply.
“I can’t hear you. And if I can’t hear you, then certainly God can’t hear you. Now say it louder now.”
“I am.” People sat up tall and looked straight at the preacher.
“Proclaim it. Louder.”
“I am!” A baby started crying, startled by the fervent response.
Pastor Hardy pressed two fingers to his lips for a moment and then began again.
“James says, ‘Obey God’s message. Don’t fool yourselves by just listening.’ So I say to you today, don’t fool yourself that the devil isn’t pleased when you hear God and don’t act.”
His congregation always pricked up their ears at invocations of the devil. He moved to the pulpit and lowered his voice.
“Let the Gospel be your guide in everything you do. Pray. Do good works. Follow the teachings of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. You do not exist without Him.”
