Ezra was in no position to explain himself. He had lost a lot of blood. His eyes were half-open, and he seemed to recognize that somebody he knew was with him, but he said nothing. He drew great, deep breaths at intervals. The sky above was showing early afternoon flashes of orange, its constant variations flooding the horizon in changing color bars like on the title screen from that weird Charles Bronson movie, the one where he steals a sword from Toshiro Mifune on a train. Red Sun.
PART TWO
1
Lisa Sample was born in Tama in 1969. Before she came to Collins she’d lived most of her life, as she told Sarah Jane the first day they met, in Pottawattamie County, which is quite some ways from Tama. Her father’d worked for a while with cattlemen in Omaha. His whole family had lived in Crescent, just across the Mormon Bridge.
It was her mother, Irene, who’d originally come from Tama; after the baby was born, she’d moved west for the second and last time. She packed what she wanted to keep into two old suitcases and left the rest of her room in state: a bed with a floral coverlet, an oak lampstand, a chair too big to fit into the Chevrolet. “All the furniture you’ll ever want back in Walnut,” Peter Sample had said cheerfully, trying to put a good face on it: Walnut was an hour’s drive from Crescent and full of antique stores. But to Irene leaving Tama was like sawing down a whole brace of trees that shielded a house from the wind. “Almost Nebraska,” Lisa’d said to Sarah Jane to help her locate Pottawattamie County in her mind. She meant to emphasize its remoteness, but also to keep her claim where it belonged: in Iowa, where she was born.
Irene Colton had lived away from Tama before; she wasn’t entirely rootbound. In 1957, she’d won a scholarship to Ottumwa Heights College. It was during her senior year there that she met Peter Sample. He was changing trains on the way home from Chicago, where he’d spent the week at a cattlemen’s convention; every weekend she picked up one shift at Henry’s Drive-In. It was Sunday. He sat at the counter and ordered a hamburger with coleslaw and mashed potatoes, but when he got out his Bankamericard to pay the bill, Irene pointed at the CASH ONLY sign on the counter. He was embarrassed, but she reached into her apron. “It’s on me,” she said; her smile looked genuine because it was.
A week later her manager brought her an envelope addressed to her; tucked inside a greeting card with a picture of Omaha on the front were three one-dollar bills. Greetings from Omaha, it said on the front, and, inside, in admirably neat handwriting: “Thanks for lunch. Hope to see you if I pass through again.”
Idly, just for fun, she wrote back to him at the return address on the envelope, thanking him; “Everybody loves the story of the Omaha man who sent me three dollars,” she said. About a month later, she got another letter, and when she answered that one he wrote back again. His letters were all substance, but light fare: pleasant, harmless, transparent thoughts from a young man who lived alone and worked around cattle. He spoke with the assumed familiarity of the irredeemably local: the guy who owns the Texaco opened up a used-car lot behind the station, I’m thinking about buying a station wagon from him; the city bought a new snowplow and the chief of police personally drives it; the Dillow family is selling their house, it’s hard to believe, their name goes back around here for generations. It felt like he needed somebody to talk to; reading his gentle unburdenings made her feel like she was doing somebody some good, which she liked.
In college she’d known plenty of boys who had Peter Sample beat for worldliness, even though he’d seen more of the world than they had; but she reckoned this in his favor, not theirs. His courtship was obvious and awkward, and felt of a piece with the small-town manners she’d learned as a child: the easy touch of the everyday, the pervasive mild formality. In the autumn of 1963, he visited Tama, taking an extra day on his way to a conference he didn’t really need to attend. Her family liked him.
She’d worked all summer doing clerical work for a dentist; it didn’t seem like a great use of her education, but she wasn’t sure what else she was supposed to do with her life. So when Peter’s visits began to observe a predictable quarterly pattern, following the seasons, Irene was receptive. One spring he brought a carton of frozen steaks packed in dry ice: “I get them at cost,” he said, not wanting to seem extravagant. Still, her father relished making the same joke at the table several times over the next month: “I feel like the president!” he said.
Over Christmas 1965 he stayed two whole weeks at the Hotel Toledo; he’d made senior accountant at the stockyard and had plenty of time on the books. On the Sunday before Christmas, he joined the family in worship at Grace Evangelical. The services were mild and gentle, wholly devoid of proselytizing, and he didn’t mind them at all; the choir sang “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior” while the ushers passed the collection plate. Irene stood singing with a soft, contented look in her green eyes, holding the hymnal open but never looking down to check the lyrics. Peter took note. She’d mentioned Bible camp in talking about her childhood, but only in passing.
He was conscious of not wanting to wear out his welcome at the Colton household, so he spent many hours alone in his room that December; it had a television, but he didn’t like to watch much television. Instead, he sat and thought, in a nice old chair that came with the room: he thought to himself about what he was doing in Tama, and what he ought to maybe do next. He tried to diagram the natural course of events between himself and Irene. He wrote down a few notes on hotel stationery, rough projected timelines extending into the future, but these do not survive.
Over time he became a familiar face in Tama. He’d stay for a weekend at the Toledo every few months, visiting the Coltons, going to church on Sunday morning with Irene; her mother and father stayed home except for holidays now, but Irene loved how the light came through the stained-glass scenes in the high church windows, and Peter didn’t mind. He stole glances at her when she bowed her head to pray, her eyebrows knitted in concentration; and he wondered to himself about the substance of her silent prayers, though he never asked. He did not pray himself but sat respectfully. Before heading home, he’d treat the whole family to dinner out.
Around town, he developed a reputation for being a little stuffy; his manners had been formed in a vanishing time. There was speculation, if not outright gossip, about whether he’d take Irene away somewhere, but he held to his pattern for over a year, nearly two. In December 1967, after knowing her for four years and having become a seasonal fixture at the table in her parents’ house, he proposed marriage at the dinner table in front of the whole family, and she said yes.
“We don’t have to leave Tama right away,” he told her the next morning when they went for a walk; he knew it would be hard for her to leave. She was thankful for a husband-to-be who was considerate and understanding, who also came from a small town. But when they explained the plan to her parents at dinner that night, her father grew stern.
“That’s a waste of money,” he said to Peter, as if there were no one else in the room.
“It’s an expense,” conceded Peter. “But it’s a temporary expense.”
“It’s a waste,” said Harold Colton. “Either you should move here, or you both should move out to Crescent.” Irene’s mother nodded without looking up from her plate.
“He’s right,” Irene said. She was of two minds about leaving home: since coming home from college, she’d felt restless, a little curious about what else there might be beyond Tama, having seen just enough at college to pique her interest. But living a whole day’s drive from her parents made her anxious, the idea of it; they weren’t old yet, but it wouldn’t be long. Her job wasn’t awful, but she didn’t care about it; starting a new life appealed to her, but she couldn’t wholly envision the particulars, and when she tried, she felt uneasy. Still, college had been fun, every year a little more so; she pictured herself out in western Iowa, going into Omaha on weekends, seeing the sights. And she wanted to be bold and decisive, to make an impression on Peter like the one she’d made when they first
met.
“You have a good job,” she said; her father nodded with satisfaction. “That’s where we ought to settle down.”
But Crescent was not Ottumwa. She made a few friends and played bridge with them, braiding simple daily threads together into a new life that didn’t feel entirely unfamiliar. For a while she felt as if she were settling in; but toward the end of her pregnancy’s first trimester, in 1968, she began to feel an almost primal nervousness, a need to be near her family. She wanted her mother’s meat loaf, not some meat loaf made using her mother’s recipe but the very one stirred together by her mother in a purple glass bowl on the tiny kitchen counter and baked for an hour and fifteen minutes in the Magic Chef oven. She hadn’t acclimated to the view from the living room window in Crescent: it still felt like somebody else’s window, somebody else’s yard. She couldn’t lay claim to it in her mind. The feeling gnawed at her as her body grew bigger; she didn’t want to have her baby in a strange hospital far away. It is hard to leave home, and sometimes it takes a long time.
* * *
“The faucet’s broken again,” Irene said to Peter at dinner.
“Seems like there’s always something with this place,” he said. It was true; he’d secured a job at the Tama Bank & Trust before leaving Crescent, but it didn’t pay like the Union Stockyards. They’d left a lot of money behind.
“I washed the plates in the bathtub,” she said. In her high chair, Lisa Sample gave out a joyful cry and slapped the mashed peas on her tray with an open palm. She was eight months old.
“Do you want me to give Henry a call?” Henry Jordan owned the house they rented, along with two other houses in town; he kept up the maintenance on them himself. Irene tried to avoid bothering him too much. He was a nice old man and she felt like he needed his rest.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Peter put down his fork and smiled at the baby, who smiled back through a mouthful of food. “You know,” he said, eyes still on his daughter, splitting his tone between business and baby talk, “back in Crescent I hear the Ketterman house is for sale. They’ve got a sink as big as a fishing hole, yes they do.” He tickled Lisa’s chin; she cooed.
“Peter,” she said.
“I know,” he said, still playing at baby talk. “But we’re throwing money away, staying out here. Throw-throw-throwing money. Yes we are!” The appeal to thrift was fair play, and a reliable arrow in the quiver.
“But we manage,” she said.
“I know we do,” he said, turning finally. “And I don’t mind. I don’t. I know you like to be near your parents.”
Lisa cleared what remained of her peas from her tray in one sudden sweep of her short, plump arm; they sprayed across the room like heavy confetti.
Irene was reaching for a dish towel.
“Terry called from the stockyards and says the new guy already left,” he said. “He asked me to reconsider.”
“She won’t eat the carrots, either,” she said, smiling up from her position on the floor. “Carrots are easier to pick up.”
“There’d be room enough for another baby, if we wanted one,” he said.
Irene had crushed several peas under her knees cleaning up the mess; scowling, she calculated the time she’d have to waste on the carpet after putting the baby to bed.
“I feel like I’m just getting up on my feet again, Peter,” she said. She remembered Crescent as a place where everything looked familiar but never felt that way.
“Well, OK,” he said, cheerfully, like he’d only been floating a mild suggestion. But the germ was in the grain. The next day Henry Jordan forgot all about the sink; it was Wednesday before he got to it, and all the while the interior of the Ketterman house grew fine and fresh in her mind. Clean counters, shiny showerheads. It couldn’t be all that much better than this, she knew, but a little might go a long way. And so it was Irene, the following week, who next raised the question of moving house, which she did by first telling Peter how grateful she was that she’d been able to have her baby at home; but it was important, wasn’t it, to start saving up for college, because time would get away from them before they knew it and costs were going up every year, et cetera. They’d been in Tama less than a year. Away, then back, now away again. So much news. It’s important to consider your choices carefully before settling on a course of action; when you keep changing course, you forget where you are. It’s disorienting.
Lisa Sample celebrated her second birthday with her family on October 9, 1970, gleefully smashing both hands facedown into a two-layer vanilla cake with pink frosting, baked by her mother, Irene, at their home, the former Ketterman place in Crescent, Iowa, population 856.
2
On the living room carpet in Crescent, Irene was trying to teach Lisa to play Parcheesi. Lisa couldn’t follow the action, but she loved the dice, the way they rattled in the little blue cup. Was three too young for board games? Her mother thought probably so, but Lisa’d arrived at every milestone early: weaned early, crawled early, and surprised everybody with her first word before she could walk (“bear!” while having The Little Engine That Could read aloud to her; the bear in question was scratching at a tree on the same hillside where the train stalled). As soon as she could say two simple sentences she began putting them together to tell stories about her dolls: “They stopped playing. They need a rest,” she explained to her mother once, sequestering a Raggedy Ann in one corner of the living room and a nameless blinking-eyed vinyl doll in the one opposite.
In town there were only a few other little girls her age. Everybody knew everybody else. The kids would play together while the mothers visited, sometimes at one house, sometimes at another; there was a single grocery store that served as a social hub most mornings. It was a good life, small and navigable.
Peter got home early; it was four. He wasn’t due home until six thirty. “Daddy!” Lisa yelled, running to hug his knees.
“I haven’t even started dinner,” Irene said apologetically, getting up, but this was strictly a formal protest: Peter’s commute, and the way it meant they only occasionally took the evening meal all together, was a hardship for her. She had grown up in a house where everyone met at the table at the end of the day.
“They let us out early to buy gas,” he said, in motion, picking up Lisa and rubbing noses with her before putting her back down. She ran back to the Parcheesi board. Irene knitted her brow.
“To buy gas?”
He took a folded copy of the Omaha World-Herald from the pocket of his fall coat. “Prices doubled overnight,” he said. “Cars lined up two blocks down the street from the station.”
Irene read the headline and skimmed the story: it had a sidebar about the best times to avoid long lines. “That’s crazy,” she said.
“It’s crazy,” he said. “People are bringing their own cans to carry away extra. The guys at the station were trying to discourage it, but people are determined.” Lisa was at the Parcheesi board throwing dice from the shaker again and again, saying the numbers out loud.
“What in the world,” said Irene.
“Politics,” he said. “All the oil used to come from Texas. I just paid twelve dollars for a tank of gas.”
“What on earth,” she said.
“Well, I know, but I can’t exactly walk to work from here,” he said: that light tone, the easy cheer. It was his strength. “Could get worse by next week. I filled it up. It’s an expense for now.”
“Nine!” said Lisa.
“An expense, sure,” said Irene, wheels turning: in two months they were supposed to drive home to Tama for Christmas.
“Just a short-term situation, most likely,” he said. “Back in July when the car was in the shop I rode in with Bill. We could try that some more.”
Irene started hurrying around the kitchen, pulling a few steaks from the freezer. “That will be nice,” she said.
“Sure,” he said. “Some company on the way in is nice.”
“Twelve!” Lisa cried in
triumph.
“How many twelves is that?” her father asked.
“First one!” she said.
* * *
A lot of people have never really been to a small town, not even to stop for gas. They have ideas about how small towns should look: they’re supposed to have maybe only one building taller than two stories, usually the bank, standing tall in the middle of a two-block downtown. There’ll be a school and a high school and a grocery store and a library, and maybe a department store and maybe a Texaco and a Shell. More people on the sidewalks than cars on the streets. Several parks with swings and slides and baseball diamonds.
There are towns like that in Iowa, plenty of them; Nevada fits the bill. More than six thousand people live there, and the sign on the Lincoln Highway that welcomes you there declares Nevada the “26th best small town in America.” It has soil testing labs, water testing labs, a high school football team. There’s a little espresso and cappuccino place just outside of downtown. Java Time. People shoot scenes for movies on soundstages and try to make it look like Nevada, but the claustrophobia they’re trying to invoke is more native to a place like Crescent, whose length you can walk in a day.
It’s not a ghost town; there are a couple of motels, and a restaurant or two. There’s a church, and a bar. There are just fewer of these places than you usually think of when you picture a town where people go to live. If you were to visit for a weekend, you’d be able to see all of it on foot; and you might say, later, that it looked like there was hardly anything there—that you didn’t know what people did there, why they didn’t just move into Omaha. I don’t think I could live there, you might say. But it’s more likely that you won’t have occasion to say any of this, because you won’t visit Crescent at all, unless you maybe have family there, which, statistically speaking, you probably don’t.
The Samples were spending their Saturday morning in Omaha, down at the Old Market; for a while they’d been able to come in every weekend, but after the gas crunch hit they made it every other weekend. They’d had their usual big breakfast; Lisa finished about half of her pancakes and was presently running around in a toy store while her parents browsed the shelves. Everything seemed a little pricey. Irene remembered her mother telling her they raised the prices right before Christmas.
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