Hope on the Plains

by Linda Byler

  Hod came over, folded himself down on the porch step, and said he needed help going through Abby’s things. They could have most of it.

  So on a day when Hannah wasn’t working at the café, they drove Goat the seven miles to the Jenkinses, the children riding on the back of the spring wagon, glad to be out of the house and away from the homestead for a day.

  They found a dusty box of journals, old black-and-white speckled composition books with crumbling, yellowed pages, scribbled with lead pencil marks like the scratches of chickens.

  “Go ahead n’ read,” Hod urged them. “You won’t hurt nobody. She didn’t have anything to hide.”

  Hannah sat and read, spellbound, surrounded by heaps of old dresses, shoes, tablecloths and white china, dresser scarves and faded magazines.

  The first entry was July 21, 1913. Hannah strained to read the barely legible scrawls. Hot. No rain yet. Garden dry. Two calves born. One of ’em got scours.

  July 24, 1913. Been so hot all day. No rain. Trying to water whenever I got extra water. Clay took his first step. Miss my momma, but don’t do no good thinking on it.

  Hannah got up, went to a rocking chair by the window where the light poured in, revealing much more writing than she had thought was there.

  Some days the wind makes me crazy, like I’m about to lose my mind. I have to be stronger or I won’t make it one more day. Can’t let Hod know, he got his heart set on this here place.

  August 3, 1914. Things isn’t good. The baby is scrawny and sickly. I don’t want to lose another one. God is watching over us. I hate this prairie, the wind, the separation from other folks. Can’t tell Hod.

  Hannah caught her breath. She chewed on the inside of her lower lip. Surely Abby wasn’t writing the truth. Surely this was not the way she truly felt. And Hod had no idea.

  September 10, 1914. Getting ready to winter in. Got squash and potatoes in. The onions. Beef cows doing good. Baby taking on some weight. The wind makes me wonder how on earth I will survive the winter. God will watch out for me I guess. I get these awful pains in my heart, standing and looking out across the prairie. There is nothing, as far as I can see, except grass and sky. How is a woman supposed to survive without the pleasure of company. My homesickness is like a growth in my stomach, crowding out my breath, barely allowing me enough air to breathe on my own. I feel only half alive.

  Abby! Hannah sucked in a breath. She held her finger at the page she was reading and turned the composition book from left to right, searching for truth, as if there would be an inscription on the cover that labeled it fiction. She read on, incredulous.

  November 11, 1914. Cooked cornmeal mush. Hod brought home a hundred pound sack. Snow came last night. Good thing we got the meal done. Now I can fry mush. Hens all but quit laying. They’ll start again in spring. I dread the night coming on. That’s when the loneliness is worst. I wake up with my heart pounding, feel like I’m going crazy. I have to get out of bed so Hod don’t know. Don’t need to worry him.

  November 23, 1914. I think I need help. Nights getting worse. Fear something terrible. Need to get help. Maybe I can be strong. Hope so.

  “Mam, come and read this,” Hannah called, holding out the black and white notebook. Sarah was folding a stained linen dresser scarf, its border crocheted with a colorful variety of threads. She placed it carefully in a cardboard box, smoothing it with her palm, as if it was a caress for Abby herself.

  “Let me see,” she said, reaching out for the proffered book.

  She read quietly, then lifted startled eyes to Hannah. “What?” she whispered. “Not Abby.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “But she was everything a pioneer woman should be. Tough, resilient. Nothing fazed her. Nothing.”

  “The death of her little girl baby,” Hannah corrected her mother.

  “But this? This suffering? You can feel it in the composition book.” Sarah shook her head.

  Together, they read more entries over the course of time. The cold, the heat, the length of time Abby lived without seeing anyone but Hod and the babies, which must have been Clay, Hank, and Ken.

  “Listen,” Hannah said. I am like a bottle filled with tears during the day. The stopper comes out at night with Hod sleeping beside me. Tears run out of my eyes and I can’t stop them. But I don’t wake up fearful no more, so must be these tears are a good thing. Maybe they’ll stop soon, then I’ll be all right. God is watching over me, I can tell. Especially when Hod is out riding the prairie.

  February 13, 1916. Days are terrible long. Hod confessed his sin to me. Don’t want to write in this book what it was but I made a trip to town and had a talk with her. Marcella Brownleaf, he said. Part Indian. It’s going to take me awhile but I’ll get over it. He went to the tavern. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have happened. Bible says to forgive, so guess I’ll follow God’s Word.

  Hannah lifted her face and shrieked to the ceiling. “Mam!”

  “Shh. Hod will hear.”

  “She’s an awfully good Christian woman, Mam. I bet you anything this is the reason she seemed to rule Hod and the boys. I bet he lived the rest of her days trying to make it up to her. You know, it gave her the upper hand over him.”

  Sarah looked at Hannah. It was moments like these when she loved her daughter. When Hannah forgot herself long enough to be happy, animated, absorbed in something of interest.

  “Could be,” Sarah nodded, smiling.

  “Listen.”

  December 3, 1916. No Christmas presents, Hod says. Wolves got too many cows. No money. We have food, no empty stomachs. Killed all the old laying hens. Stuck the meat in Mason jars and cold packed it.

  “Sounds like it,” Hannah said grimly.

  When Hod came in, they packed the journals with the things they would take back home with them. Hod waved them away, saying it was just woman stuff written in there.

  “I don’t need no books to mind the past. Them days was heaven on earth, every day. Me and Abby and the boys, God’s green earth, some good horses, and a buncha ornery cows that bucked the tar outta each other.

  “We built this here home with hard work and lotsa good luck. Coundn’ta found a better woman, always happy, kept herself busy, never pined for her ma and pa the way some of ’em done. She was a good woman. None better.”

  A slow anger burned in Hannah. She couldn’t look at him sitting there with his blackened hands spread across his denim-clad knees. Unwashed denim, she’d wager. As satisfied with his own past as she’d ever seen anyone. The man had no idea of the sadness poor Abby had dealt with.

  “Where are the boys?” Sarah asked. “We’ll soon be through here, so Hannah and I can cook supper for you, leave it on the back of the stove.”

  Hod looked at Sarah, then nodded, shook his head repeatedly, saying now that would be just awful nice of her.

  Reluctantly, Hannah placed the books in the boxes, carried them out to the spring wagon, returned to find her mother peeling potatoes, with Hod hovering at her elbow.

  Potatoes! Why did the Jenkinses always have food? It seemed as if their pantry and cellar was always well-stocked, even during the days of drought that stretched on and on.

  Hannah decided to ask and was given a good enough answer. They had over one hundred fifty cows. Wolves got a few calves, coyotes maybe, but those longhorns were hard to bring down with their horns. “Take a few away, we won’t know the difference,” Hod said.

  Did he know the Detweilers had only five cows remaining? Her pride firmly in place, Hannah decided to keep that bit of information to herself.

  “So, how’s the winter treating your herd?” he asked, at the moment Hannah decided not to tell.

  “We lost five.” This from Sarah, who wouldn’t think of keeping anything from Hod.

  He whistled low. “So you have what, five more? Six?”

  They left the Jenkins ranch that day with Hannah refusing to speak to her mother, a dark cloud of outrage riding above her head. It was none of Hod’s busines
s how they were faring. Besides, he didn’t have to stand there and give that low whistle, then search Sarah’s eyes before looking at the bright blue overhead light, the dry sky that stayed the same throughout the winter months.

  Did Hod see something in Sarah’s eyes? They acted like, well, almost if there was a secret attraction, the way they could tell what the other was thinking.

  Sarah lifted her face to the sky. “You know, Hannah, if the heat arrives, the grass already parched, what will keep the cows alive? How long will the wells continue to give water, if it hasn’t rained for a year?”

  “It isn’t a year.”

  “Yes, it is. Our last rainfall was in May of last year.”

  “You’re keeping a journal?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then you don’t know.”

  Sarah rode in silence, Abigail like a sleeping rag doll in her arms, jostled by the movement of the wagon, the steady sound of Goat’s hooves on the hard packed dirt. Everywhere, as far as they could see, was a kind of defeated springtime. As if the earth gave its best, valiantly trying to produce one green shoot, then gave itself over to the drought.

  There was still hay in the barn. The grass cured on the stalk all around them. As long as the windmill turned and the well gave its water, replenishing the tank, they’d be all right. She had to keep her job at the café, no matter what.

  Manny still had not found work, but kept busy cutting trees for firewood. Hannah estimated they had enough old windfalls in the creek bottom to last another four years, maybe five. So, according to her way of thinking, their situation was not dire, yet.

  Sarah rode beside Hannah, harboring a secret wish that God would shut the clouds from giving rain for awhile longer. She didn’t know where these thoughts came from. She just knew that Abby’s journals were past echoes of her own nights, and too many days.

  With a glad fierceness, she had returned to the homestead, to the plains, to stay with Mose’s grave, her beloved, who lay buried beneath the sod, his soul departed to his God. But her fierce desire to survive, to prosper, had begun to sputter, and now she found it hard to find the remnant of a spark.

  To go home. To find peace and fellowship with her sisters. Estrangement was real. It was the amputation of a family tree’s limb, injuring the entire tree. She could not speak of her waning need to fellowship with those who had moved here—the Ben Millers and the Ike Lapps, the new Stoltzfuses. Hadn’t her heart leapt when Jerry Riehl spoke of their wish to return home? And then, her father, waiting to arrive. Had that been God’s will as well?

  Her last letter home had been filled with the situation surrounding them, an act of God, circumstances beyond their control. Would they still have failed, in the face of this drought? She glanced sideways at Hannah. Her face was unknowable, set in stone.

  What was she thinking? What would she do when confronted with the fact of their failed homesteading? She wouldn’t mind at all if the rest of them returned home. She’d be only too glad to watch them leave.

  Sarah sighed deeply. Perhaps it would begin to rain, and they would continue on as before. They would build the herd, build their lives, the church would grow. Clearly, she was confronted with two choices. Which one did she truly desire?

  And still the rains did not come. There was no point in planting the garden; the seeds would lay in a row of dust.

  When the sun took on the shine of summer’s heat, the shimmering waves that spoke of midday fierceness, Sarah stood on the porch, a hand turned palm down to her forehead, shading her eyes from the unrelenting glare, watching the brown grass rustling in the wind. She could see no way to survive. She would wait, say nothing. Someone would surely come to speak of these dire conditions.

  Manny walked up on the porch, sweat staining the back of his shirt, his hair lined with moisture. Beads of perspiration formed on his upper lip, and for a moment, Sarah thought she could detect a certain desperation in his dark eyes.

  “Getting hot, isn’t it, Mam?” he asked, always pleasant, always hopeful.

  “Yes, it is.”

  A comfortable silence stretched between them. Both looked out over the arid land and made no comment, as if they knew their words would be like a cloud of small flies, bothersome and useless.

  Sarah had just turned to go in to check on her bread dough, when she thought she saw the beginning of a gray cloud in the west. She hesitated, took her stance by the porch post, one hand held to her forehead, squinting out over the expanse of prairie to the horizon.

  “Is that what I think it is?” she asked.

  “Where?”

  Sarah pointed with a shaking finger. “Does that look like a storm cloud to you?”

  Manny looked, then squinted, straining his eyes to see what appeared to be a narrow brown mountain ridge.

  “I would say it looks like a storm cloud, except it’s the wrong color. It’s a yellowish gray brown.”

  They stood, watching. The cloud increased in size. As it approached, the wind picked up, sending tumbleweeds and loose vegetation hurling ahead of it.

  Sarah ducked her head, closed her eyes and spit the dust and grit out of her mouth. Dry grass smacked into them.

  There were no prairie hens, no rabbits, gophers, or birds running ahead of the storm, the way it sometimes happened when a thunderstorm moved across the prairie.

  On it came. The wind whipped the corners of Sarah’s apron, slapped her skirt to her legs, and tore at her covering until the pins pulled her hair.

  It roared across the prairie, surrounding them with a thick wall of dust and whipped-up dirt, flung along by the force of the ever-increasing wind.

  Sarah cried out, remembering the windows. Inside, Eli and Mary stood wide-eyed, pulling down the wooden, paned windows.

  “Will it rain now?” Eli asked, his brown eyes hopeful.

  The faith of a child, Sarah thought. Abby ran to her, flung herself into her arms, and held tight, her face hidden in Sarah’s neck.

  Manny came through the door, struggled to close it behind him, his face pale in the disappearing light. The house took on a yellow sheen, a dark aura of weird light, as the wind shrieked and moaned around them. It was as if the whole house was being scoured by buckets of sand, a hissing, rasping sound above the roar of the wind.

  Sarah sat down weakly, gazing at Manny in disbelief. He shook his head. It was literally a storm of dust and dry wind, hurling anything loose ahead of it, grass and weeds, loose boards and scattered hay.

  They both thought of the windmill at the same time. Manny grasped the arms of the chair, pulled himself, a question in his eyes.

  “No. No. You can’t go out in this. The windmill will …” her voice faded away.

  “Mam, this wind will propel the gears to a frantic pace. It will break the mechanism that operates the pump.”

  “We have Ben Miller.”

  And still the wind blew, the dirt scoured the house. Dust seeped in between the sash of the windows, beneath the door frame, even drifting down from the ceiling, as if an invisible hand was scraping it down.

  The wind increased, the sound like a scream, setting their teeth on edge. They both thought of Hannah, in town, hoping she would be all right, wondering how long the wind would stay.

  Eli huddled on the couch, drew his knees up to his chin, his hands to his ears, blocking out the sound. Mary began to cry softly, cradling herself with her thin arms.

  “Come, Mary,” Sarah said, above the roar of the wind. She crept into her mother’s arms, with Abby, her arms stealing around both of them, reaching out for all the security she could find. Manny sat with his mother, pulled Eli into his own arms, huddled together at the mercy of wind and dust.

  In town, men raced for their automobiles, tried to beat the storm to their distant homes dotting the outskirts of the small group of homes and businesses. Many became stranded along the roads, careening haphazardly into ditches or mounds of scattered weeds and dirt, unable to leave the small amount of safety their vehicles afforded.


  The town hunkered down, prepared to wait out the worst of it. Betsy seemed to take it in stride, shut doors and windows, talking above the roar of the wind and saying this would bring a change now. “It’ll blow the drought out. The rains’ll come now.”

  Hannah stood, stiff with fear and disbelief. The battle that raged within her was worse than the storm of wind and dust outside the café. Her mother and Manny were barely managing to have enough will and determination to stay, no matter how hard they tried to convince Hannah otherwise.

  Would this send them straight back to Lancaster County, their land of milk and honey?

  Manny had attended the meager church service on Sunday, came home to his supper of bread and stiff, salty cornmeal mush, and talked of Ike Lapp’s plight. Talked of that Marybelle, mostly, how she was withering away, much too thin, without proper food.

  Hannah knew he cared for her; she could tell by the dreaminess in his eyes. She knew too that for a young man harboring thoughts of a rosy future with the doe-eyed Marybelle, there would be only hardship and disappointment on the prairie.

  Only rain would save them. Perhaps it would appear after this, in the form of thunderstorms, the way Betsy said it would.

  How had it come to this? This grinding down of wills, flattening hope, leveling even the staunchest spirit? Even Sarah turning into a white-faced, grim-lipped ghost of her former self?

  Doddy Stoltzfus would come. His brothers, Ben and Elam, would bring renewed hope. Wasn’t hope the necessary ingredient for pioneers?

  Hannah sat in the darkened café, the electric lights blinking above them at first, then not blinking back on, leaving them in the gray storm-riddled light of midday.

  In the afternoon, when the sun would have been slanting in through the tall front windows, a thin light appeared through the blowing dust and grime. The roaring ceased, trickled down to a more manageable gale, the kind of wind that flapped at skirts and sent light objects flying off porches, twirled leaves and bent tall grasses. Betsy said she may as well go home, if she wasn’t afraid the wind would start up again.