Anna Was Here

by Jane Kurtz

  “What’s that language?” I asked.

  “You don’t recognize German?” She clicked her tongue. “Ach, jammer. My parents went to German school and English school.” The rooty wrinkles deepened. “All of that is gone now.”

  I looked at her. “Were you really sleeping?”

  “To everything there is a season,” she said. “A time to talk and a time to keep silent.”

  As I pushed the wheelchair down the path, it was a time to talk. “I live still in the house where I was born,” she told me.

  “Is that where my grandma was born, too?”

  “Mama said she would have her last two babies in the hospital.” A chicken ran in front of us, and she clicked at it fiercely. “The rascal will keep escaping. Where’s Morgan with that dog?”

  “Who’s Morgan exactly?” I asked. “What dog?”

  “The dog that loves the chickens.”

  I imagined a dog writing chicken valentines.

  The day was bright and hot and full of buzzings and whirrings on either side of us and then a faint boom-boom in the distance, so I aimed at the trees and stuck to the middle of the path. To our left was the big barn. “Are there horses?” I asked. “Can I ride them?”

  Great-aunt Lydia shook her head. “Ach, it’s all empty. But I used to take Little Katherine to see the horses. She helped me snip my braids by the light of the moon to make them grow faster. I taught her to make bread.”

  “I’ve never made bread,” I said.

  Great-aunt Lydia clicked as if I were a naughty chicken. “My mother said in Russia a girl could make bread before she could walk.”

  “Are we Russian?”

  “Ach, jammer, no.” She shook her head. “Swiss-German from Russia.”

  We were in tree shade now. I wiped sweat out of my eyes, and a giant slug landed on the back of my leg. I whirled around.

  Oh. It wasn’t a slug. A big silent dog had flupped the back of my leg with its cool, wet nose. Another bounced toward us through the trees and sloppily smelled me up. “TJ!” Great-aunt Lydia said. “That’s terrible rude. Poor TJ had to leave his work.” She said something in German and translated. “Work makes the living sweet.”

  “What does a dog do for work?”

  “He found people. Didn’t you, TJ? Caroline says her dogs have the gift of nose, but now they’re farmers.”

  Cousin Caroline was the cop who was going to fail at farming.

  Something zoomed over our heads. I ducked. The dogs barked wildly. A girl’s voice floated down. “TJ and Bob-Silver! Cease and desist.”

  I peered up through scraggle branches. A tree house. I felt itchy to get up there.

  “Morgan?” Great-aunt Lydia called. “Is it you? What kind of pestilence are you sending down upon our heads?”

  “A screaming monkey,” a girl’s voice said. “They sell them at the lumberyard. That’s funny, isn’t it?”

  Wouldn’t it be great if Morgan, whoever she was, said, “Come on up”?

  Bob-Silver rustled through the grass and brought us a small stuffed monkey with a cape. “Is it for helping with the lavender?” Great-aunt Lydia called.

  “It’s not useful for anything,” the voice called back. “I like it because I thought a lumberyard would only have lumber.”

  “Hurry you down and meet your third cousin.” Great-aunt Lydia reached back to pat my hand. “Or are you Morgan’s second cousin once removed?”

  “I can’t,” Morgan called. “I’m working on my kings and queens project.” Another monkey whistled through the air. I studied the tree house with longing.

  “Caroline had an old farmhouse moved onto the property,” Great-aunt Lydia said happily. “She makes terrible good pie; Dorcas has the sin of envy.” She held up the egg carton, and we started off, the dogs huffing around us. By now I didn’t really need a paved path to guide me.

  I could follow the smell.

  CHAPTER 14

  Angel of Death

  I followed the smell out of the trees and saw a chicken house and a fenced chicken yard and a tall woman with a black braid. A clump of silver hair hung over her forehead. She was wearing a shirt that wouldn’t rip even if she had lifted things and slung them around.

  “Brave Caroline,” Great-aunt Lydia said. “To farm these rocky old acres.”

  The dogs bounced over to Cousin Caroline. “So Mikey really did it.” She walked up and shook my hand. “Welcome to Lavender Fields Forever.”

  She ran this farm all by herself? I looked at her with pure admiration.

  A woman stooped through the door of the chicken house. She was wearing a baseball cap and had a sunshiny face. I predicted she might be another great-aunt, and as soon as she came up and introduced herself as Great-aunt Ruth, I knew I was right.

  “Oh, happy day.” She hugged me. “You tell your folks I’ll wait for the potluck to say hello because I’m sure they’ve had quite enough family for now. Are you coming to the potluck then?” she asked Great-aunt Lydia, but she didn’t wait for the answer. “I live in town, but I’m out to the farm every day to buy eggs. Best eggs in the world.”

  “That’s because we have happy hens,” Cousin Caroline said. “They don’t need coffee to get going in the morning. They get busy catching as many bugs as they can, even though nobody gives them a medal for their personal best.”

  “Bob-Silver likes them,” Great-aunt Ruth said. “Look at how he’s pointing.”

  “Dogs retire, but they can’t ignore their noses.” Cousin Caroline smiled at me.

  “You folks will become egg customers, too, I’ll bet.” Great-aunt Ruth tapped my head. “You ever need a ride, give me a jingle.” She climbed into a blue pickup truck that had a big dent in its side and roared off, waving out the window.

  “Morgan!” Cousin Caroline called. “Come meet Anna.” She took the empty carton from Great-aunt Lydia. “Now that she’s in fifth grade, that girl likes doing her lessons and projects in the tree house. Takes a bit to dig her out.”

  Homeschooled? Lucky duck. “How come you became a farmer?” I asked. “Dad said his mom used to say—” Oops. I stopped more words from flapping out.

  Cousin Caroline smiled. “For a long time your grandma was my hero. She sang like an angel. One day she went to the city and bought a guitar, which was the boldest thing anyone I knew had done.” She bent to yank a skinny root out of the ground.

  “Dad plays the guitar,” I said.

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “Was it hard to become a farmer?” I asked.

  Cousin Caroline unhooked the fence to the chicken yard. “First time I ordered a box of chicks, I could hear their shrill little peeps even with the post office doors closed.” She continued into the chicken house, but her voice kept calling the story to us. “They always got quiet when Morgan and I picked them up, long as we supported their feet. Maybe it’s how they know they’re not being carried off by a cat.”

  I leaned on the wheelchair and waited. Cousin Caroline came back out. “Then a cold spell hit. A single chick survived. One day it was sturdy and running around. The next day I saw Angel, the mouser, with two yellow twig feet hanging out of her mouth. She slurped the feet in, crunched, and sat back to clean her whiskers.”

  Ugh. “So the chicks all died?”

  “God’s eye is on the sparrow,” Great-aunt Lydia said fiercely. “Ha.”

  “I don’t know if you can blame God.” Cousin Caroline reached over as if she would rub Great-aunt Lydia’s ears but patted her instead. “Blame me for not knowing how to farm. Blame Angel, the cat, the angel of chick death. Next time we knew to put the chicks in a warm space we could close off completely.”

  She handed me the carton, heavy and warm. What was it like to hold a fresh egg? “Do you miss being a cop?” I asked.

  “When I was in the city, my bones missed the land.” Cousin Caroline looked at me with her gray eyes. “What about your father? I remember him as a wretched kid who chased me through the cornfields and tried to
scare me with a frog.”

  “Did he scare you?”

  She smiled. “I liked frogs. Still do.” She looked around. “Come on. Morgan can catch up.”

  On the way back I heard that odd boom-boom in the distance and something beside the path rattled, making me jump.

  “Seedpod.” Was Cousin Caroline trying not to laugh?

  “Oh.” My face burned. “I thought maybe it was a rattlesnake.”

  “A snake doesn’t want to meet you any more than you want to meet it. Just avoid tall brush and any deep, dark crevices.”

  “Do you hear that buzzing?” I stopped. “And”—I pointed—“see that smoke?”

  “The buzzing is cicadas. They’re early this year—noisy bugs, aren’t they? The smoke is some farmer burning weeds.”

  I wanted to know if cicadas bit people, but I didn’t want to seem babyish.

  “I’d rather meet a snake than have a fire,” Great-aunt Lydia said.

  Uh-huh. “Me, too.”

  Cousin Caroline squeezed my shoulder. “I heard about those fires in Colorado. Aunt Lydia, give this girl a box of baking soda. Always a good thing to have around in case of fire.”

  Cousin Caroline was a one-person Safety Club.

  She leaned over and kissed Great-aunt Lydia.

  “I know I won’t see you at the potluck, Auntie,” she said, “but I’ll see you there, Anna.”

  When we got back in the house, I parked the wheelchair and joined Great-aunt Dorcas at the scratched kitchen table. “Is that pie dough?” I asked. “Can I help?”

  “I’ll do the rolling. Can’t serve up a Stucky pie with a crust as tough as pig hide.” She glanced at Great-aunt Lydia and muttered, “No rest for the wicked.”

  We worked to the sound of apple curls dropping plink-plink into the compost bucket and the thump of the rolling pin. I helped Great-aunt Dorcas until we had a line of pies on the counter with pretty pinched crusts and apple juices bubbling. I hoped she would offer me a slice, but she didn’t.

  I hoped Morgan would come running up the ramp, but she didn’t.

  I hoped for a box of baking soda, and when Great-aunt Dorcas went in the other room, Great-aunt Lydia showed me one on the kitchen shelves I could have.

  As Great-aunt Dorcas drove me away from Lavender Fields Forever, I thought about angel grandma who had once been Little Katherine. Somewhere right around here she had looked up to see a pencil line tornado dropping down out of the sky.

  That’s when I heard the call: “Save your sister! Save the cat!”

  CHAPTER 15

  Save Your Sister, Save the Cat

  Safety Tips for Floods

  1. Do not stay in a flooded car.

  2. If your car is swept underwater, DON’T PANIC. Stay calm and wait for it to fill with water, and then the doors will open.

  3. Hold your breath and swim to the surface.

  4. If you are swept into fast-moving floodwater, point your feet downstream.

  5. Always go over obstacles. Never try to go under them.

  I looked at Great-aunt Dorcas, but she had her mouth firmly shut. Had I really heard something?

  We drove back the way we had come. Were Isabella and Midnight H. Cat in bad danger? Maybe. After all, I’d been attacked. “What did Simon do before?” I asked. “You said, ‘What has Simon Stucky done this time?’”

  Great-aunt Dorcas looked severe. “He who goes about as a talebearer reveals secrets, but he who is trustworthy conceals a matter. Proverbs 11:13.”

  I didn’t think it was being a talebearer to clear up a mystery, but I could see I wasn’t going to change her mind. When she pulled into the driveway, I politely said good-bye and ran upstairs to put my baking soda with my Safety Tips booklet in the pink room. I looked in the mirror.

  I hadn’t turned into Moses either. “Save your sister! Save the cat!” Was God really talking to me? It wasn’t an outloud voice, but it didn’t seem exactly like any thought I’d had before.

  Why me?

  “Anna,” I could almost hear Jericho saying, “you are a child of God. Why not you?”

  But how could I save Isabella and my cat? They were too small to run away from prairie fires or wolves or tornadoes—Who was I kidding? I was too small, too.

  I picked up the Safety Tips booklet and paged through it. I could be prepared. I could watch out for any dangers—creeks that could flood, for example, or bales of hay on fire.

  But how could I keep them in sight all the time? I had to go to school.

  Or did I?

  Midnight was sitting on the windowsill in the pink room. When I went over, her ears flicked forward. Did she smell dog on me? I stroked her twitchy back, wondering if she was planning an incredible journey home. “Don’t give up yet,” I whispered to her.

  Mom poked her head in. “Isabella is down for her nap, and I saved lunch for you.” She came in and put her arm around me. “So you got to see the farm?” She didn’t wait for an answer before she walked me out to the stairs. “I . . . well . . . I know everyone here means to be kind.”

  Not everyone, I thought. Not Simon. I looked at her and saw the face of someone who was feeling bad—bad for letting Great-aunt Dorcas take me off and probably for not knowing much about casseroles and pies.

  Poor Mom.

  Mom let me eat beside her while she put books in a bookcase. I watched her bite her lip. I could tell she was already missing teaching history. “Can I help you with alphabetical order? I’m done.” I showed her my fingers. “See?”

  “Sure.” She smiled and handed me a stack. An. Ar. Be. After a few minutes, I said, “Next time you teach about the gold rush, I predict you’ll be telling your students you know why the forty-niners rushed right over Kansas, huh?”

  Mom laughed. I hoped she would say, “This experiment is not quite what I thought it would be.” Instead, she gave me one of her beloved history lessons. “Congress squabbled a long time about whether to let Kansas be a state. While they argued, floods left many families without a crop of any kind. Then the weather turned dry.” She wiped a book with a rag. “When news came that Kansas finally was going to become a state, people whooped and hollered and fired Old Kickapoo cannon in the air.”

  “Tell me another Kansas disaster story,” I said.

  “Eighteen seventy-four.” She gave a fake shiver, and I knew it was going to be juicy. “Rocky Mountain locusts plague. Twelve-point-five trillion locusts swarmed down in a mass bigger than California and ate all the crops.”

  I handed her books back. “I thought locusts died out after the plague Moses brought down on the Egyptians.”

  “Mo-om.” Isabella’s voice interrupted, wailing from upstairs.

  Mom got up slowly. “For years, when the settlers plowed, they brought up shovelfuls of locust eggs. They’re extinct now.”

  “Is Dad around?” I asked.

  Mom pointed to the front door. I found him on the porch, looking into the afternoon heat shimmers. “Watch, Dad.” I ran to the tree and pulled myself up. He gave me a thumbs-up that meant “some muscles.” I dropped back down and nestled in beside him. Dad ran his knuckle down my hair part. “So you got to see the farm,” he said. “Or what’s left of it.”

  “Cousin Caroline said you chased her with frogs.”

  He laughed his good old rhinoceros laugh. “Did you see the pond?”

  “I saw a barn,” I told him. “I saw a chicken house.”

  The warmth was pressing on our heads. In Colorado we sometimes got snow this time of year. “Why won’t Great-aunt Lydia come to the potluck?” I asked.

  “Won’t she?” He shook his head. “Long ago church people in Oakwood took sides over whether it was ever right to go to war. One night the church burned. Lydia was born not long after that. It was a hard story to grow up hearing, I think.”

  I squeezed his arm. “Dad, I think I should help Mom with Isabella tomorrow. Also, I need to tell you—”

  Dad’s pocket buzzed. To my surprise, he took his phone out a
nd started listening. That was just wrong. Dad always said, “We rule our phones; our phones don’t rule us.” In Colorado he refused to interrupt real conversations for phone conversations. “Gandhi wouldn’t be listening to his phone right now,” I wanted to say.

  Dad stood up. “The best way you can help is to go to school tomorrow. And sleep in your bed tonight. I need to get back to the church.” He started off.

  What? This was not the way my dad behaved.

  “Morgan doesn’t have to go to school,” I shouted after him.

  I watched the soles of his feet disappear. When I was little, I would stand on Dad’s shoes and dance around his office. Even now, when Jericho and I visited, I did it when we were feeling silly.

  But in Kansas, I reminded myself, Dad had to fix a hump. That meant he had to be very serious and maybe even let his phone rule him.

  Inside, I made a living room corner playground for Midnight H. Cat. Then Mom and Isabella and I worked on preparing the basement. One warm jacket apiece. Rubber-soled shoes. The fireproof lockbox with important documents.

  In the late afternoon Dad called Mom to say he wasn’t coming home for supper. Appalling! He hadn’t even come home by bedtime. Mom didn’t say anything when I put the sleeping bag in the hall, so I curled up there with Midnight H. Cat, praying without ceasing that God would remind Dad about having an understanding heart.

  CHAPTER 16

  Meeting Morgan

  The second morning in Oakwood, Kansas, I woke up in the pink room again. A note was beside me on the pillow. “We know changes aren’t easy. Take one more day home from school. Love, Dad.”

  Maybe it was an answer to prayer.

  At breakfast Midnight H. Cat purred in my lap while I ate. Mom said, “This would be a good day to try taking your cat outside.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  It was a miracle I even had my cat. Luckily, my teacher this year was a big fan of democracy, and our class voted to try to walk instead of having our parents drive us to school. That’s why Mom and Isabella and I heard noises of desperation coming from a roof. I went tearing back to my house to get Dad. He climbed up the fire escape and reached down the chimney and hauled out a shivering, clawing black kitten.