A Fireproof Home for the Bride (10 page)

Sunday they had packed the car with clothes for her mother and Birdie and driven directly from church to Grandmother Nelson’s, where Maria Gonzales had stayed by her bedside. Emmy hadn’t had a moment to do right by Ambrose after the service, and the brief time she did meet his eyes, she still felt a hint of shame. She couldn’t continue to look at him, though, as she felt the magnetic scorch of Mr. Davidson’s stare affixed to her own. Christian had steered them all past the Brann pew without stopping to engage the three men. An hour later Ambrose had surprised Emmy by driving Pastor Erickson out to the farm to attend to Lida’s prayers. She’d never missed a day of church under his watch, not for childbirth, not for harvest, not for blinding snow. Her face glowed at the approach of the pastor and the door swung shut behind the old man. What a gift that must be, Emmy had thought, and had hurried to bring them tea in order to witness Lida’s powerful faith. But Ambrose had intercepted the tray and carried it up himself, asking her to stay and wait for him in the kitchen. When he had returned, he preempted her desire to confess the details of her night out by getting down on one knee in front of her.

“I’m no good for you, Emmy,” he’d said, looking at her hand. “But if you’ll consider me, I’d like to make our engagement formal as soon as possible, and put all others aside.”

The heat on Emmy’s face had risen hotter, and she had stayed perfectly still, finding herself incapable of returning the sentiment. This moment had been expected for so long, and yet it had none of the thrill she had once imagined it would have. She wanted to be swept with the notion that Ambrose would always take care of her, but all she could see was the small spot of scalp that was slowly being revealed on the very top of his head, a spot that foretold nothing but sheer, rapid decline. There were a few gray hairs mixed into the sandy brown she’d taken for granted, and from this angle, she could see the first deep lines etched into his brow. The handsome lanky boy had somehow vanished while he’d been away at school, leaving behind only sinew and the grit of being a Brann. He was already old. She hadn’t even started being young.

“Oh.” Her voice had caught, as she knew she must say something and fast. She could sense her mother lingering just outside the kitchen door, quietly folding napkins on the kitchen table, her hushed whispers to Emmy’s father an indication that she was anxious for a response. Emmy had no choice. “Well, yes, I suppose that’s right.”

Ambrose had leaped to his feet and drawn her into his arms, bending over to bury his face in her hair. Suddenly and inexplicably unable to return his tenderness, she had tensed up with the urge to push him away. The shame of such an ungrateful feeling consumed her, so she had held his embrace as long as she could stand. When they at last parted, she gripped his arm with her right hand, counting to ten before she let the touch fall away. Now that their union was suddenly real, the affection she had for Ambrose was like a window shade drawn against the weak light of a slivered moon, cutting off the warmth she had expected to feel, even as she realized there was so little there.

The effect that Ambrose and Emmy’s official engagement had on Karin was like boiling water poured over a block of ice. Emmy had never felt so genuinely respected by her mother before, nor treated as though her opinion held weight. Every night after school, Karin had telephoned from the farm to make suggestions to Emmy of things she should be doing over the next year, in preparation for both the wedding and for married life. Karin had also told her of Ambrose’s frequent visits to the farmhouse, his kind gestures to Birdie, and his constant help. When he had offered for Pedro to check the gravid cows every night, Karin insisted on paying for the help, even though it was understood that Ambrose would merely roll the cost up into the accounts of his eventual ownership of both farms. Emmy had only begun to grasp the method by which the Nelson farm acreage had slowly seeped over the years since Grandfather Nelson’s death into the Branns’ sugar beet expanse, but she was all too aware that the grim necessity of her central role in this usurpation was to be accepted with fortitude and grace.

Sitting in the cold parlor with the Bible open in her lap, Emmy felt the constricted mobility of her situation hem tighter and tighter around her heart, until hot, silent tears slipped down her cheeks as she listened to the low undertones of Lida snoring away upstairs, a fine companion sound to the doleful strains of the violin on the radio. The car ride with Bobby Doyle felt as if it had never happened. Ambrose was certain to appear at the farmhouse bright and early; it was best that Emmy try to sleep. She exhaled and was surprised to see her breath plume out into the room. The temperature had dropped considerably and the wind was howling yet more frigid gales out in the yard. Emmy checked the thermostat on the wall. The needle hovered around fifty degrees. She tapped it, frowning. Rubbing her hands briskly together, she first went to the kitchen to put a kettle on for filling hot water bottles. Dreading the trip belowstairs into the cobwebby undertow of the cellar, she recalled her father’s detailed instructions on how to relight the pilot on the furnace should it snuff out, which it most likely had. There was no way she could let it slide until the morning or pretend the heat had failed while she was asleep. She would have to face down her fear of the dark spaces buried under the house and do her best to fix the thing without help.

Once the water was hot enough, she filled the red rubber bags, screwed on their tops, and slipped them into the cozies her grandmother had crocheted. Emmy then took a deep breath and walked the ten paces across the kitchen to the door that led to the cellar. She touched its smooth wood and slid her hand down to the glass knob. Straightening her shoulders, she rolled her eyes at her own stupidity and jerked open the door—it had always stuck a bit at the top—and holding the rail banister, she leaned over the flight of planked stairs to grope for the fine metal chain that attached to a bare bulb. The sulfurous smell of the leaked gas caused her to sneeze.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d ventured down these stairs, with their open backs and rough-hewn unfinished wood, worn smooth in the center of each plank by the boots and shoes of three generations. This was her grandfather’s sacred place. When she was really small, she would have to sit down on the top step and carefully move her bottom down each board, afraid of slipping as she bumped her way into his lair. The basement hadn’t been touched since his death, and as the bulb swung from the motion of being pulled on, she caught sight of his carefully arranged animal traps hanging from their looped chains along the wall at the bottom of the stairs, furred now only with dust. At one end were the small gopher traps with their toothless arching jaws snapped still; in the middle the slightly larger, smoother traps that Grandfather Nelson had used to trap the money pelts—fox, raccoon, badger. Emmy grimaced as she approached the biggest one, reserved for coyotes and the occasional wolf. The jaws here were immense, slotted, and cruel. She could see him even now, slipping a live mouse into the tiny cage at the spring of the trap before prying apart the jaws and setting the pin, having already secured the loop of the chain with a long spike driven into the ground. Grandfather Nelson had taken her along to check the traps until the time they had found only the gnawed ankle of a bobcat, the sight of which caused Emmy to imagine such suffering that she never went near the gun-metal traps again.

Out of instinct, Emmy reached up into the middle air of the cluttered cellar and drew on the chain of the next light, relieved that it still worked. She could make out where her father had walked across the hard-packed dirt floor toward the squat white enamel machine sitting in the corner where once a coal burner had sat. Grandfather Nelson had replaced the backbreaking beast long ago, proud of his switch to all-gas appliances years ahead of most farmers. Without further hesitation, Emmy marched to the corner of the room, ignoring the scurrying sounds of wintering rodents, and it wasn’t until she had twisted shut the gas valve and was kneeling in front of the furnace that she realized she had made this journey without matches or a flashlight to see the small pipe that needed reigniting.

Emmy sat back on her heels and looked around for matches. An odd feeling of association rose in her as she remembered a long-ago hot summer day playing down here even though she knew she wasn’t allowed, poking around in an olive green metal box that held linens and leather-bound books and old newspapers. She’d dug past these dull objects to the bottom, finding a delicately carved wooden trinket box. Inside was a ring so large she could fit two of her fingers inside of it. A delicate scene of an armor-clad knight high on a horse was carved on the flattened oval surface. Emmy had loved it instantly, imagining within the small circle a vaster place of castles and kings, princes and princesses, maybe even dragons. She had slipped the object into the treasure pocket that her grandmother always sewed into her summer dresses with a small drawstring ribbon to lace up the top. Emmy had re-ordered the large box before crawling into her favorite hide-and-go-seek space near the cool darkness of the coal bin to wait out the scorching sun high outside.

Time had passed while she daydreamed about fairy tales, maybe as little as an hour, maybe as much as three—Emmy’s grown-up grasp on the order of childhood events collapsing into the singular moment when she had realized that Grandfather Nelson had descended into the cellar. She could see now through her child’s eye the old man slumping on the short stool, opening the metal box and drawing out a rectangular white sheet. He had held the fabric in his hands for quite a long time before unfolding it and draping it around his shoulders like a cape, smoothing his hands over it as though stroking the fur of a newborn pup. She had held her breath from the dark retreat as he had then taken a smaller length of fabric—a pillowcase?—and placed it high up on his head. The tall point of it dipped limply, reminding Emmy of a storybook drawing she’d once seen of a white-faced clown wearing baggy pajamas with large black buttons down the front. She had giggled, slapping a cold hand over her mouth as Grandfather Nelson had dashed the hat from his head, taking three large strides in Emmy’s direction. Her mirth had pitched into a squeal as she tried to scurry away from his outreached hand, her bare feet scraping across the dirt floor as she was lifted swiftly up by her dress and tossed toward the stairs, where she had gained her feet and scrambled up, away from his bellowing voice, past her grandmother and mother in the kitchen, and out through the yard until she had reached the creek’s bank, where she had climbed the familiar limbs of a gnarled old beech tree and sat there silently weeping, terrified that her grandfather would hate her now, that he would replace her companionship with Birdie’s.

Emmy’s grandmother had brought her a sandwich at suppertime and had handed it up to her, and Christian had come out at dusk with a ladder to carefully pluck her sleepy body out of the tree. Grandfather Nelson had died not many months after, and somehow Emmy still felt the two events conjoined, regardless of the stroke that had claimed his life. On the day of his funeral, Emmy had slipped the stolen ring into the hole they had dug for him, but the guilt of her theft still burned on her fingers eight years later.

Emmy looked around at the makeshift shelving that had been fashioned from boards wedged between the wooden supports of the house, sifting through the many canning jars filled with assorted sizes of screws and nails, the small paper boxes containing broken watches and pennies from emptied pocket change. There were milk-colored glass insulators from when the electricity was first strung to the farm from town and the linemen working on the project had given them away as souvenirs. Dust seeped into Emmy’s fingertips as she turned over objects she hadn’t been allowed to touch as a child. In fact, she had only ever come back down to the cellar when she had to fetch something for her mother. Her fingers began to ache with the cold when upon a high shelf she found a box of safety matches, which she took to the boiler, lit one for illumination and another for the gas, and, rubbing her eyes of the creeping memories, restarted the furnace and made her way up the stairs in time to hear the clank of the heat beginning to pump through the arteries of the house.

*   *   *

After shutting down the lower floors, Emmy carried the hot water bottles up the polished stairs and stopped at Lida’s door, listening before slowly turning the doorknob and easing herself into the room. A small lamp glowed beside the oversized four-poster, Lida’s frame tiny in the middle of her bridal bed. Emmy stroked the dear old woman’s forehead lightly and pulled her hand back as Lida’s eyes opened. She looked at Emmy and reached out the arm that hadn’t moved since the stroke, guiding her granddaughter to her side. Emmy climbed into the bed, slipping the covered rubber bottle between the sheets and blankets at Lida’s feet.

“Are you in any pain?” Emmy whispered.

“No, dear,” Lida replied, her voice weak but clearer than Emmy had expected. “I’m at peace.”

“Is there anything you need?”

“Just you.”

Emmy curled herself on the bed next to her grandmother and listened intently to her rasping breath, counting each one in order to placate the fear of the sound stopping.

“Tell me,” Lida said. “Do you love the Brann boy?”

“I don’t think so,” she said, surprised by how quickly the answer flew from her lips, and by how what she really meant was
No.

“Good. Love never works,” Lida said in a small voice, almost like that of a child. “I loved Stephen, but he loved Josie, and she loved Ray. I didn’t love Ben, but it was a good marriage.”

Emmy sat up at the strange squeak in Lida’s tone. “You mean Grandfather?” she asked. She had so infrequently heard his given name that it sounded as foreign as the others in her grandmother’s grasping list.

“Read to me, Emmaline,” Lida replied, sounding more like her usual self, as though a different part of her had come for a visit and then left on the same train. “From the Good Book.”