by Rae Meadows
“People are talking,” Birdie said, pushing her peas into a little pile. “Isn’t that right, Freddie?”
Samuel looked up from his plate and Fred nodded, his pale face dappled in shade. Annie wiped the blue-checked napkin across her mouth, about to chastise Birdie, but then stopped herself.
“And what are they talking about?” he asked.
Birdie cocked her head, her eyes insouciant. “What do you think they’re talking about?”
“Birdie,” Annie said sharply.
“No, it’s okay. Let’s get it out there. The boat, right? What are they saying?”
“I’ve been stuck here, remember? Ask Fred,” Birdie said.
His daughter’s edge was flinty, unnerving. His sweet girl! Samuel swallowed a bite of mashed potatoes but it moved down his throat too slowly, a warm and pasty lump. He turned to Fred, who scribbled something on his notepad and slid it across the table: “Where you going to get 2 elephants?”
“Do you laugh when they say things like that? It’s okay to laugh,” Samuel said. “It’s good to laugh.”
Fred smiled a little, but shook his head.
“They’re making fun of him,” Birdie said.
Annie wasn’t jumping in, Samuel noticed. She was letting him fend for himself. He set down his fork and sipped more water. A fly landed on his buttered bread.
“Forget it, Freddie,” Birdie said, softening her tone. “They’re just being dumb kids.”
“More chicken, Samuel?” Annie asked.
He looked down at his full plate. “I’m okay, thanks.”
“Pull your mask up as soon as you’re finished,” she said to Fred. “The doctor said.” She rearranged the serving platters, her hands jumping around the table like crickets.
Samuel wanted to place his hands on hers to still them. She seemed restless and bothered. Earlier in the day she’d dropped a serving platter, porcelain shards all over the floor. Her eyes darted away from his when he tried to meet her gaze. He could see that the boat was weighing on her, but he was doing this thing. The boat was under way and he could not turn back. He just wished he knew how to make her see, make her believe in what he saw.
“What did the mayor want?” Birdie asked.
“The mayor?” Samuel asked.
“Saw his car coming this way yesterday.”
Annie quieted her hands, palms flat on the tablecloth.
Fred looked at his supper. He should have kept it to himself. He would keep everything to himself from now on. No trouble, no trouble, no trouble.
“I forgot to mention it. You collapsed so soundly when you came in,” Annie said.
“What’d he want?”
She breathed through her mouth, concentrated on the crooked lines of kernels on her corncob. He doesn’t know anything, she thought, he doesn’t know anything at all.
“He has an idea. For wood. Or Styron does. Something about boxcars.”
“Boxcars?”
“A mess of them at the old yard.”
“That’s good news. That’s real good news.” He smiled, and she braced herself for the three words that she knew would follow. “The Lord provides,” he said.
She felt like upending the whole table, running until her lungs burned and her insides retched. With little wind, flies landed on the relish, the chicken, the rhubarb cobbler.
“Funny he came all the way out here. Could have called. Not that I don’t appreciate it.”
Fred studied his father’s face. Yes, it was strange, Pop, he thought.
Birdie rubbed her shoes against the dirt, the small stones pressing into her feet through the thin soles. Her arms ached from helping her father with the grain bins, but she was secretly glad for the hard, silent work. When did you tell your parents you were pregnant? When did you come clean about lying with a boy before marriage, a boy who ran off, leaving you with a baby, which left you no choice but to stay here forever?
Samuel sighed and rested his chin on his hand as he chewed. He eyed the level of the sun and sipped his milk.
“I best get back out there,” he said, sinking some even as he said it. “If I’m going to do thirty today.”
“You barely ate,” Annie said. “Won’t do you much good to collapse while threshing.”
“Get through it every year. I’ll do it again.”
He winked at Annie whose mouth lifted only ever so slightly in return. Birdie knew her mother was angry about the boat, but she would never admit it. Fred flung a pea at her with his spoon. It landed in her hair. She slid it out with two fingers and whipped it back at him.
“Children,” Annie scolded.
“He started it,” Birdie said.
“Birdie, please,” Samuel said.
“Barbara Ann, I do believe you will be sixteen next week. Let’s try to act our age.”
“Okay,” she said, sighing, tired of being so mad, suddenly seeing her parents’ disappointed faces when they found out she was pregnant. She would be due in the spring. Baggy clothes and a big coat through the winter—maybe she would be one of those girls who didn’t show much—and a trip to the hospital in Beauville where she would give the baby away? Surely there were families wanting babies. She’d have to ask Mary Stem to drive her, think of a lie to tell her parents. By the time Mary told someone else, despite promising on her life not to tell anyone, Birdie would have given birth, the baby whisked away by some happy family, and she would be herself again, free to say goodbye to Mulehead, go all the way to the ocean. It was a child’s fantasy. She couldn’t even play it out in her head without feeling sunk.
“Don’t wait up,” Samuel said.
“Good luck,” Fred wrote. He smiled, his mask on his chin.
“Grain tank’s near full,” he said.
“I’ll be ready,” Birdie said.
“Ann?” Annie shifted her gaze from the horizon to Samuel. “Thank you.”
“I’ll wrap some chicken for you,” she said, knocking over her chair as she stood. “And a bottle of milk.” She rushed off to the house without righting the chair.
The three remaining Bells looked at the chair for a spell until Fred hopped up and set it straight. A wet cough racked his body.
“Get your mask on, son.”
Fred pushed the mask over his mouth and nose, slumping back in his chair.
“When the grain’s in you’ll help me with the boat?”
Fred nodded, placated. Birdie retreated to the kitchen, her shoulders rounded under the weight of the dishes. The thin wispy clouds had bulked up.
“I don’t have timber enough for the frame, but we can start cutting the ribs soon. Need forty or so.”
Fred flipped to a blank page of his pad and wrote, “I will measure.”
Samuel was about to protest. Fred’s skin was sallow, and ashy half-moons shadowed his eyes above his mask, a reminder that he was still not well.
“As long as the animals are tended to. And your mama doesn’t need help with anything.”
Fred clapped once and scurried inside, leaving Samuel alone at the table. He picked up a green bean with his fingers and dipped it in the pool of butter at the bottom of the serving bowl before folding the whole thing into his mouth. A large cloud had darkened, and he watched it inch its way across the sun. It sat high overhead. Instead of the black or brown of a duster it had a deep blue cast.
Annie came out with a metal lunch pail in one hand and a thermos in the other. In the flat light she was an apparition. A beautiful ghost. He stood to meet her.
“We should talk,” he said.
She stood still, and the breeze picked up and blew her hair across her face. She made no move to brush it away. He took the pail and thermos.
“Tonight, maybe,” he said.
She didn’t answer, just looked at him with those honey eyes.
“Ann? Annie?”
She blinked and looked up at the sky and then he felt it too. On his hand. Then again on his head.
Rain.
CHAPTER 10
The tears came with the rain. They mixed on Samuel’s face in warm rivulets and it was as if God had brushed him with his fingertips and all he could do was stand there with his face to the sky. Droplets ran into his ears and he didn’t care. Annie was laughing and he didn’t know which was more startling, the rain or the sound of her jangling laugh that had always gotten him in the gut, that laugh he had missed without knowing it. He took her hands and twirled her around and his heart felt light. And now Fred and Birdie were here, too, whooping and spinning until they fell down, limbs out like stars, eyes closed to the patter of rain.
Samuel breathed in the smell of wet dirt and didn’t even care that the tractor and combine were out to get rusted because he felt like a boy, joy expanding so full under his ribs he needed to run. So he did. He ran a large circle around his children and his wife and said thank you to the Lord. He still had seventy acres left in the ground to drink it up. Water dripped from the ends of their noses. The insistent rush of rain the most beautiful hymn. He peeled off his overalls and shirt, even his shorts. Birdie screamed and laughed when she saw him, and then Fred followed suit and tore off his mask and his clothes until he was naked, too, all spindly limbs. He too was a boy again, returned to himself, without fear of choking on air.
The sky was dark but not menacing. Maybe now the water wouldn’t rise up and they would not need the boat. Samuel didn’t know what his visions had meant, but he would not dwell on it in this moment of wonder.
Birdie, her hair already soaked, took off her shoes and socks and rolled up her pants, and Annie, Annie! She unbuttoned her wet dress and stepped out of it, her slip soon stuck to her frame, and it was all Samuel could do not to take her in his arms and bury his face in her neck and lie with her in full view of the world.
“Rejoice,” he said. “Rejoice.”
The ground was softening in the hard rain. Fred hucked a wet glob of dirt at Birdie, hitting her shoulder, and she went after him and ground a handful into his hair. Annie, like a toddler, sat down and rubbed mud onto her bare legs. The rain washed her clean. A pair of crows sat high in a locust tree and cawed as the leaves dipped and swayed in the rain. Below, the bowl for the beans caught drips.
But Birdie noticed first. She held out her hands. The drops were lightening, beginning to taper, and Samuel looked at Annie. No. It was not enough. It was worse than not enough. It was a punishing reminder of what once was and he had to steady his thoughts. Samuel squeezed his eyes shut and said the Lord’s Prayer again and again, trying to push away the darkness tugging at him.
He would be tested. He would abide.
The rain stopped. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. He was naked and wet and filthy. Fred was wheezing. Birdie angrily tied her hair in a knot. Annie shook out their wet clothes and piled them on her shoulder like a limp body.
Under that bright, withholding sky, no one said a thing.
* * *
SAMUEL PULLED IN the rest of the wheat. There was no more rain, but no dust either, and for that he gave thanks. The lines at the granary were short. Many of the farmers simply plowed under what was left of their crops. At not quite six bushels an acre, Samuel would not break even. It took three years to go broke, they said, maybe another year to hang on hungry, scraping by on handouts and on eggs from their chickens. The talk at Ruth’s was whose luck would finally peter out. A farmer in Beaver County had taken the government’s offer and watched as his threadbare cattle were herded into a ditch and shot, all for not even enough to save his tractor from the bank. Then he kissed his eight children and his wife and went out into a field and shot himself in the mouth.
It was the end of July. The late harvest left little time for Samuel to get the next crop planted. After he bundled the hay, he had to turn right around and plow. The grasshoppers were worse than ever. With no plants to gnaw on, they had set themselves on the trees and even the fence posts. Annie had mummified her garden in chicken wire and grease-stained cotton muslin she had salvaged from behind the mercantile in Herman. Fred had helped her spray a mixture of strychnine and molasses over the top, so when Annie came out to weed and water, she had to shake off a layer of dead grasshoppers, hundreds of them hitting the ground with a brittle crackle.
In daylight, Samuel plowed and furrowed and spread seed and talked to God, and by lamplight he went back to the boat.
* * *
HE FINALIZED HIS crude design with the help of books. With a pencil and ruler and a roll of butcher paper, he drew and redrew, recalculating the dimensions until the engineering felt sound, the lengths and widths, how each piece contributed to the vessel, how much lumber he would need, how much oakum to pack the joints.
“Lard?” Fred wrote. He had kept reading, too, now that he was a boat builder.
“Might seal the wood a bit,” Samuel said. “Good thinking. Worth a try, anyway.”
Fred tapped his temple. He took a two-by-two from the boxcar lot the mayor had brokered on their behalf. The board towered over him when he stood it on its end. He imagined sailing expertly across deep water, a red flag snapping above. He measured the wood as his father had showed him, scowling with seriousness at his task.
Boards lined the walls, and they began treating the wood in the steam box, testing the bend they could get, holding the curves in C-clamps as the planks dried.
“It’s going to darn near take over the whole barn,” Samuel said. “Once we get her framed out.”
Fred nodded, unable to quite fathom how the boat would look, how massive it would seem.
“Guess we’ll roll it outside once the thaw comes.”
“Who gets on?” Fred wrote.
“Us.”
“Hens,” Fred wrote.
“We can probably bring some birds,” Samuel said.
Fred set the board between the grips of a vise.
“You can saw it,” Samuel said. “You know what to do. Seen me do it enough times now. Watch your fingers.”
It was a moment like Samuel could almost remember with his own father, working in the smoky light of an oil lamp in the rough-cut tongue-and-groove barn back in Kansas. His father sharpening the steel share of the walking plow, his arms moving in a rhythmic row above the spinning whetstone. He’d been only ten when his father died, and sometimes he groped for a memory other than the few well-worn ones he’d already turned over in his mind so many times. He couldn’t recall his father’s voice, but he still knew the halting cadence, the long silences. Samuel’s father had passed on to him the belief that you must be grateful for the land, no matter what it gives you back.
In Fred’s small hand, the saw looked cartoonishly large, but he worked it slow and steady, gnawing through the old wood with concentration and purpose.
“You’re doing good,” Samuel said.
They worked in quiet tandem until his mother called Fred in for bed.
* * *
ON SUNDAY, THE Bells headed to church, not speaking during the car ride over. Since the tease of the rain, it seemed there was little to say. Annie refused to talk about the boat, and Samuel could think of little else. Birdie brooded in the backseat, hoping the car would run into the ditch. Fred poked her arm and showed her a long splinter wedged into his middle finger. She squeezed it between her fingernails until its head popped up from the skin and he yanked his hand away.
“Let me get it,” she said.
He held his hand in his armpit until she shrugged and turned back to the window. He worked on his finger with the dirty nails of his other hand.
“Your mask, Fred,” Annie said, glancing behind.
He glared at the back of her head and went back to the splinter, without putting on the dingy mask jammed in his pocket.
“I’d like to have Jack Lily over for supper,” Samuel said. “In appreciation for all his help with the wood.”
Annie did not look at him. “All right,” she said.
* * *
THE LOOKS WERE impossible to deny when they took their seats in their usua
l pew. Glances over the shoulder, narrowed eyes. Gladys Abernathy, who had helped Fred with boat books at the library, got up and moved to a different pew. Somehow the small rain, the indignity of the hope it inspired, was the Bells’ fault. The Bells and their stupid boat. If Samuel seemed oblivious, Annie understood too well, familiar as she was with reading the meaning of what went unspoken. When Annie was a girl, her mother had stood beside her father to greet the parishioners for Sunday service. When Mrs. Simpson, her father’s mistress, had arrived, laughing loudly, Annie had watched her mother’s frozen, tight-lipped smile, as she turned slightly away without offering her hand. The anger in a squint. The snub of a lifted chin. Annie exhaled her agitation. Samuel’s obsession was no longer just his own.
She hadn’t seen the mayor come in, though she knew he was behind her somewhere. She could sense the heat of his gaze, her hair prickly, her neck warm. How thrilling it was to feel this way, rattled by his mere presence, wanting only to give in to his pull. But desire was awful, too, full of trapdoors and sharp hooks.
“I’m going to get some air,” she said to Samuel.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine. I’ll be back before the opening hymn.”
“Birdie, go with your mother.”
“No,” Annie said abruptly.
Annie squeezed past Samuel’s knees to the end of the pew, a sharp tang in her throat. Darkness pushed in on her vision and she rushed for the door without looking up.
After a few minutes, when she had not returned, Samuel nudged Birdie. “Go see to your mother anyway.”
Birdie rose and moved to the door, pushing through to outside and all that brightness. She didn’t see her mother, but she was happy to be out of the hot church. At least out here the wind made it seem cooler. She sank down to the shaded bottom step and dropped her head against the heels of her hands.
Dear God, she thought, please take this baby home. Take it like you took Eleanor. Take it and I’ll do anything else you want. I’ll even help Pop with the boat. Or make Cy come back, you could do that too. Or instead. Whichever one you think is best. Amen.
