I gunned the old Ford and screeched out of the driveway. The Scottish terrier was going berserk at his post. “Well,” I said, once we’d turned the bend and the barking noise had died down, “What did you do?”
Emma was sitting in the back with her arms folded across her chest. “Nothing. She followed us everywhere! She’s stupid.”
“She’s stupid,” Claire mimicked. “She sings to herself.”
“You said you would bring Mom home.” Emma’s voice was husky. Now that I had actually seen Alice I knew I was accountable to the girls in a way that I hadn’t been before. We sat in the car in our driveway and I told them that their mother was in the county jail because sometimes people blame the wrong person for their own troubles. I’m not sure I sounded convincing. Emma blurted out that that wasn’t fair. Claire was still chronicling the oddities of Miss Bowman: She stored her potholders in the oven, the dogs drank out of the toilet bowl, she couldn’t even open one of her eyes.
“Shut up,” Emma said to Claire. “But how is she going to get out? How will she ever get out of jail?”
“She was eating crackers right in front of us!” Claire shouted.
Emma whooped her sister over the head with a book. “I said shut up, you idiot!
How
is she going to get out?”
I parked the car by the house and gathered up Claire. She was in shambles. We went inside where I tried to put her back together. It was a temporary fix. I then delivered a short lecture on the criminal justice system in our state. I explained that they couldn’t keep Alice for more than ninety days, three months, until the end of September. Emma, with either her innate understanding of manmade systems, or else her American instinct to throw money at a problem said, “Couldn’t we pay to get her out?”
“It will take a lot of money,” I said.
“Grammie will pay.”
“Yes, well, maybe she can help us.”
“What if she can’t? I’m not ever going to Miss Bowman’s again. Never. Who will take care of us?”
Emma was probably thinking in practical terms, such as who would spend hour after hour amusing them, day after day until September. I was thinking not only of those hours, but also of the details. I had never washed the girls’ hair, never cleaned out their ears or cut their toenails. I wasn’t in the habit of cooking. I might not have thought of any of the rituals if Alice hadn’t outlined a timetable for them in a letter of instruction. The letter, the only one I’d received from her, had arrived a few days earlier. Once a week, she said, she clipped fingernails, scrubbed behind ears, washed the hairbrushes in the sink, and set them face down on a towel to dry. She told me I should sort the laundry by color, as if it was important. “Don’t put cotton in the dryer,” she warned. She reminded me not to be hard on Emma about eating things she hated, not now, especially.
What is this? I had said to myself after I read the letter. I didn’t know how Alice could be so matter-of-fact. I didn’t know how she had the serenity to think of such inconsequential things. I thought back to how calm she had been when they took her, and then about how animated she’d been during our visit. I wasn’t sure if she was ill, or if in fact she was
getting better. I was as mystified by her behavior as I was by the charge. Even the drought, and the sick lamb who had lost control of its limbs, even I suppose, the death of Lizzy—all of that hard luck and tragedy was something a person could expect as they grew older. There was nothing in our experience, nothing that had prepared us for being taken from our life.
And although I probably sound like a simpleton, not knowing that you clean a child’s ears or wash underwear in hot water, I had been absolved of those tasks for years. Alice and I had divided up the duties from the start. She had once said that that was one of the beauties of having a farm, that she didn’t see herself stuck with the drudge because all of the jobs were tedious. We were in the whole mess together. We had laughed over the picture of ourselves toiling as if we were part of a chain gang. Thoreau thought it was a misfortune to inherit a farm or even, I suppose, willingly own a farm. Farmers are poor brutes, he said, slaves to the soil. They spend so much time working, their aching fingers trembling with fatigue, their backs giving way, that they don’t have time or energy for the finer fruits. I have always thought that work is as common and fine as air, something that we become a part of. I am drawn to the out of doors, to the ordinary pleasures of everyday work. Alice used to say that if I was a bird I’d be the first one to sing, the wayward robin who’s cranking it up before a ray of light gives anyone allowance.
I have thought a fair amount about our farm, about our house that was built in 1852. It was still a good house, even though it didn’t look like much. There are thousands of those houses across the Midwest. White clapboard houses with old windmills in their yards, many of them standing empty now on the prairies of Kansas and Nebraska. They are a series of squares, built according to need. Ours are deceptively strong houses, stronger than the winds of a twister, determined against insects and drought and long winters, determined against time, against all of the generations that have passed through them. I have tried to imagine the men and women who have broken their bread in our kitchen, and tilled the soil and fallen asleep at night, too tired to take their boots off, as I sometimes was. The farmer who built our house, Thomas Clausen, kissed his wife good-bye and walked off to fight in the Civil War. An old guy down at Del’s told me about him. When Clausen came back from the war
he turned the other way and went to California to pan for gold. I don’t know if his wife and children begrudged him his absences.
Alice once told me that pioneer women suffered from anorexia, that there was evidence that proved it was so. I couldn’t imagine Thomas Clausen walking up the lane from California only to find his wife skin and bones. I was used to thinking of that first family as long-suffering but philosophical, wise and robust. I found a picture up in the attic of a later family, standing out in front of the house, all of them, even the baby, looking grim as hell. I actually don’t have too much rapture about time past, although Alice has accused me of being hopelessly sentimental. There has never been a time of simple light. Still, I try to imagine the land for the taking, and what it must have meant to have space for as far as the eye can see. The Wisconsin Indians in 10,000
B.C
., perhaps sleeping right where our yard was, hunted mastodon.
Mastodon
. They ate bison, giant beavers, caribou, and elk. It is unthinkable now that anyone could ever have drunk out of our rivers and lakes. I don’t have the power to imagine what it must have been like. I can’t even visualize the endless prairie, the vast tracks of woodland. I can’t hold it in my mind long enough to know absolutely what we’ve lost. And so the loss is magnified, knowing, as I do, that my powers are poor, and that our world has become diminished beyond all measure.
I have thought about the boy who lived on our farm, Gurdon Huck, who in 1908 fell off a hay wagon and broke his neck. I found his father’s log of weather and planting and harvesting, on the floor of our closet. It was under a hatbox like a piece of trash. His last entry says, “June 9, 1908. Yesterday our boy fell off the wagon. Broke his neck. Dead.” I showed the notebook to Dan, but I wasn’t willing to give it up to the Dairy Shrine. It belongs to the house. In the attic, in an old trunk, we found books on agriculture and etiquette and religion, a fountain pen, a bag of lace, a cracked platter, a pie tin filled with black-and-gray stones. We had no idea who gathered the stones or where. We brought them downstairs and set them in the middle of our kitchen table. They were smooth as could be. As the weeks went on they gathered dust and crumbs and jelly spots. They came to look less and less like relics from the ages and more and more like us. I cleaned them up and put them back in the attic.
The people who lived in our house probably considered, as most of us do, that our moment is what is real. It wasn’t too long after we moved to the farm that for me time began to run together. That way of seeing probably comes with age. The past seemed to flow into the present, in some instances taking over the here and now. It was all the traces that made me feel the quickness of passing time, of passing generations. Alice wondered what we should do with the old things, the laces, the stones, the pens, the books. For her it was a matter of deciding between Goodwill and the monthly trash pickup. “They’ll stay in the attic,” I said. I tried to tell her that that pile of stuff served as a reminder that we are passersby, nothing more. Yet I also believed that those few things in the chest, all of the associations long gone, the layers of wallpaper in our bedroom, the journal in the closet—all of that experience matters. Alice reiterated that I was an incurable romantic. I could only say again that the past, the details of the past, in some terrible and impossible way, matters. I say impossible because what seems important today is probably not tomorrow, and in any case most everything is lost and forgotten, or else destroyed. I stubbornly believed, in the six years we lived on the farm, that the people before us in our house left their history to us, knowing that we would safeguard it.
It took those six years we lived in Prairie Center to really know the place. Even Claire, young as she was, knew the haunts and the hunts. In May, when the grass was so green it hurt to look at it, the air so overpoweringly sweet you had to go in and turn on the television just to dull your senses—that’s when Claire knew it was time to look for the asparagus in the pastures. If it rained she wondered if she should check our secret places for morels. In June, when the strawberries ripened, we made hay and the girls rode on top of the wagon. I was ever mindful of the boy who had fallen off and broken his neck. In July, the pink raspberries, all in brambles in the woods and growing up our front porch, turned black and tart. In August, the sour apples were the coming thing. In September, there were the crippled-up pears in the old orchard. In October, we picked the pumpkins and popcorn. And all winter, when there was snow, we lived for the wild trip down the slopes on the toboggan.
Maybe I dreamed this. I’m not sure anymore. I remember, that first April, when we found the crocuses coming up all over the hillside in the
back beyond the pond. Alice went to the slope and knelt. She turned to me, her face flushed with pleasure. She said, “Do you think the farmwife who planted these tried to imagine us as she dug the holes? Do you think she made a prayer for the farm? ‘Here’s hoping for another hundred years! Here’s hoping for Howard Goodwin!’ ”
Chapter Eleven
——
I
T IS A RULE
of nature that taking a day off on a farm sets a person back at least a week. I had been keeping up with morning and evening chores and letting everything else slide. In the early hours, on Monday before the girls woke, I mustered the energy to kill the lamb that was half-dead. With five years experience I still considered myself new enough at killing. I was clumsy. I stunned the lamb with a blow to its head and then quickly slit its throat. I had killed the lambs and the chickens for food, and occasionally I had to kill something as a kindness. I knew that each time I slaughtered an animal I thought less about it, and that if I let it, the process might become pretty well mechanical. I struggled between wanting to numbly get on with the job, and the need to pause, to offer thanks to the breathing animal, to wonder at its essence before I knocked the life out of it.
I knew without looking past the front porch in those first weeks that each day something more was lost in the drought. It didn’t seem to matter much. Our life without Alice was wrong. After Rafferty failed to get the bail reduced, he told me that there was nothing to do but wait. His refrain was that one word: Wait. I don’t think he had any idea how cruel his pronouncements were. Nothing to do but wait. And just how does a
person wait, I wanted to ask. I remember sitting in the chair in the living room, too tired to close the windows and doors against the continuous blast of scorched air as I skimmed over the library books I’d gotten on the legal system. The girls lay on the carpet, panting. It was strange, how in the heat and quiet they lost their childishness. Occasionally they’d rise up and put a Lego block on top of another. Snapping one block into the next used all their strength. They were like inner tubes with slow leaks as they sank back down to rest. They lay without pillows, with their heads turned sidewise, flat on the floor.
There was the reckless and false accusation to consider, and there was the simple fact of missing Alice, of needing her. I held on to that fact. It would have been easy to be distracted by the anger that had been unleashed against us. I had to remind myself over and over that the real reason we were listing and badly off course had nothing to do with the community uproar. It had everything to do with the absence of our navigator. She managed us. She managed our bodies and even our minds, our spirits. She put her foot down when we stank from the barn, and she informed me when I needed a haircut. She made me talk, something that has not been my strong point. She wanted to know about things like the Black Hawk War. Although she’d forget the major points between the tellings, she always seemed to be interested. She was ignorant about history, and in particular about her own times. “Who was Barry Goldwater again?” she’d ask. “What was it that happened at that convention in 1968, the one in Chicago?”
Without her, without the family, I might have worked night and day. Before supper she went out on the porch and rang the old dinner bell. I came, thirsty and hungry, back to our time and place. I remembered this: the food steaming on the table and Alice playing a Mozart sonata she loved. It was the only thing she ever played on the tinny piano that had come with the house. She sang to the girls in her hoarse voice, what she called her “loony voice.” She read to them for hours and she let them paint her face all over with clown makeup. Alice once told me that when her mother died it was as if the lights had been snuffed out, as if the volume had been turned down so low you couldn’t hear anything. If Emma and Claire had been able to put words to their feelings they might have said the same.