Plains Song (22 page)

The boy said, “I want to see the saber-toothed tiger.”

“Their daddy tells them these stories,” said Caroline, “but he won't take the time to bring them down here.”

“They were here before we were,” said Carl.

“Yes, and they'll be here when we're gone,” replied Caroline. The edge in her voice surprised Sharon. What were the children to think? In the Hall of Elephants they would see monsters that would be here when they had vanished—not merely part of the past but most of the future. Wouldn't it give an imaginative child nightmares? Sharon thought briefly of Alexandra Selkirk: the pleasure she would feel in
Man's extinction—her sorrow at Woman's loss.

Just as Caroline had feared, there was no parking place, so Sharon was dropped off with the children in front of the elephant hall. Thanks to the football game, they had the exhibit to themselves. An elephant was there, remarkably lifelike, with long curving tusks, the trunk raised like a trumpet, but the huge creature was dwarfed by the world's largest mammal. An ancestor of the rhinoceros, this colossus was not from the plains around Lincoln, but from the vast wastes of Siberia. Whatever impression it left on the children, Sharon was transfixed. It had simply not been brought to her attention that the world contained such creatures. More than sixty feet long, twenty feet high, it was here among smaller monsters because no other hall was large enough for it. It was Sharon's impression that the beast bulked as large as the head seemed small. For millions of years, a mind-numbing abstraction, it had waddled about waiting for extinction. In due time it had come. This message—and it was a message—weighed upon Sharon like the heat. In displays along the walls were the skeletal remains of smaller creatures, one with tusks like the woolly mammoth. As a background the artist had depicted what might have been the appearance of the plains at that time, a fanciful landscape in pleasant somewhat muted fall colors, like those worn by Sharon. Here and there a strange beast might be seen wandering in a zoo of animal crackers. Also exhibits of bones, as the diggers had found them; exhibits of the tracks left by a vast reptile, the dinosaur. What had destroyed him? A
change in the weather? Was he too well adapted to a marshy climate? Who could not see in this—it occurred to Sharon—the future of man in a world of women. This startling thought she owed to Alexandra Selkirk. A flight through time. Even at this moment the males were gathered in one of their primitive ceremonies, blind as the dinosaur to what was happening. It pleased Sharon to note that the girl, Crystal, showed the effects of an experience she would long remember, while her sniffling little brother wet his face at the water fountain. In the diggings of the future, the football coliseum would be the interment site of an extinct species. But why—she would ask Alexandra—had it taken so long?

A short visit proved to be long enough. Sharon bought them each a packet of arrowheads, and stamps, then they stood at the front waiting for Caroline. She had bought gasoline and had the windshield of the car cleaned. A few minutes later, north of the east-west freeway, Caroline turned in the seat to say, “Look back!”

The city of Lincoln, a shimmering mirage, rose from the rolling plain as Cora might have dreamed it. Dinosaurs had roamed here. The saber-toothed tiger had hunted the river canyons. At this moment a sampling of the state's population was watching a game of football. Sharon's mind was a jumble of confusing impressions. She let her head loll back on the seat. Now and then a lark's cry, distorted by the car's movement, fell on her ear as cool and liquid as water. In the back seat Crystal read aloud from the comic book spread on her
lap. To keep her hair from blowing, Caroline had put on a straw hat, the elastic chin band puffing out her cheeks.

“How is Blanche?” Sharon asked. In Madge's letters she had always been “well,” or “fine.”

“You'll see her.”

“She never married?”

“Aunt Sharon,” Caroline said with emphasis, “we don't get married anymore unless we want to. We all had your example.”

Her lips parted, Sharon let the wind dry her mouth. After a moment she said, “My
example?”

“Was it boys you didn't like, or marriage?”

“I don't remember being asked.”

“Mom said you could've married almost anybody.”

Only Professor Grunlich came to Sharon's mind, along with a sigh of relief. “I wanted my independence,” she said, “like you.”

The answer appeared to satisfy Caroline. How much did these brash young women know? It startled her to think they might know more than she did. Caroline drove with one hand, her head tilted back, her free hand surfing on the air at the window. What was she thinking? That Sharon Rose had not feared to act, but feared to speak out? In the dark field they were passing, a huge piece of machinery, like a giant insect, sprayed the earth with revolving sprinklers, the spray blowing like smoke. A rainbow immaterial as a dragonfly's wing hovered between Sharon and the sky. The heat and shimmering light drugged her senses, weighed on her eyes. Unaware that her lips had
parted, she heard the gourd-like sound of wind in her mouth. Dreamily disembodied, she eagerly held on to this fragile impression. Ned Kibbee was driving, the side curtains were flapping, Fayrene and Madge were talking, and in the fields rows of shocked corn basked in the diffused fall light. The wires dipped and rose, the poles and trees flicked past, and in the fabric of this fancy, like a patterned design, she sensed both something lost and something gained. Cora Atkins was dead. Madge had called her to say, “She went in her sleep. I hope I'm as lucky.” Sharon did not believe in pain, but she had bridled when Madge had taken comfort from her death in sleep. After a long and humiliating illness, Lillian Baumann had died, her mind and soul wide awake.

“Aunt Sharon?” Caroline said.

“Yes.”

“Did you ever see
Wanda
?”

Nobody of that name came to Sharon's mind. “Wanda who?”

“It's a movie.”

“I see so few. Was it a good one?”

“It was horrible.” At the thought of it, she grimaced. Her lips were set in a thin tight line.

“As bad as all that?”

“This woman. She's been married and had a baby. She's so beat and depressed she doesn't care about it, or anything else. She's so beat she's hardly human. A man picks her up. She's like a stray dog.”

“Why did you go to see it?”

“It was on the TV.”

“You couldn't turn it off?”

“No.”

The finality of the no was disturbing. Sharon could not think of anything so appalling she wouldn't turn it off.

“That's where we're different,” said Caroline. “If that's how it is, I've got to look at it.”

If startled, Sharon might suck in her lip, hold it fast with her teeth.

“You turned it off because you couldn't face it, didn't you?”

“What are you saying? I couldn't face what?”

As plain as gospel, Sharon understood this as an accusation. What had she failed to look at? At the back of her eyes, where she couldn't avoid it, where, indeed, she had to confront it, she saw the iron frame of the bed, the sagging mattress evenly divided into two compartments, as if invisible bodies lay there, beneath the bed the gleaming, lidless night pot, and above it the dangling cord to the shadeless bulb. “It's not so hard to turn it off,” Caroline said. “What's hard is to admit it.” In her voice, in her gaze, Sharon felt Cora's inflexible will. Were they so much alike? Just in time, she cried out, “Watch the road!”

One wheel had edged into the ditch grass, sweeping the weeds. The car zigzagged wildly, the tires screeching, toppling the children about like pillows. They shrieked with pleasure. Perspiration filmed Sharon's face and throat; her lips and mouth were dry.

“Just think of it!” Caroline said, gripping the wheel as if to shake it. “The two of them together, sleeping
and eating together, year in and year out, getting to loathe each other, none of it for the better, all of it for the worse—”

Sharon cried out, “Do you hear what you are saying?”

“They see it better than we do!” Caroline replied, but that was not Sharon's complaint. She was thinking of Cora, not the bug-eyed children, all ears, at her back. It seemed so obvious that Cora would hear, wherever she was, a voice as loud and brash as Caroline's. At a turn of the road the wind blew hotly into her face. If she kept her eyes closed, would it all fade away—what she had managed to face, and what she had preferred not to? Hearing grass sweep the bottom of the car, she opened her eyes. Caroline had driven off the road into a shallow ditch of high yellow weeds. Grasshoppers leaped to fall with a metallic click on the hood and the windshield. She remembered how Madge—Sharon had lacked the nerve—would hold the creatures firmly between her fingers and watch them spit “tobacco juice” like Emerson. The hardness of their bodies repelled Sharon. She would run screaming if they touched her. The sight of a sand viper wriggling through the grass would drain her face of blood, leave her speechless. Madge would take her by the arms and shake her. How explain such squeamishness in a country-born child?

Beyond the tall weeds that edged the road, tree stumps torn out by their roots were heaped at the center of a clearing. The deep pits left in the earth had not been filled. It brought to her mind the craters left
by bombs. To the rear, almost the color of fire, ripe grain concealed the horizon, and far, far back, the blades of a harvester caught the light. Why had they stopped?

Matter-of-factly, Caroline said, “That's what's left.” Sharon continued to gaze with light-creased eyes, a buzzing in her head. Even as she turned to look at Caroline she understood. This pitted field of the stumps of dead trees was all that was left of Cora's farm. All that was left of the trees, planted by Orion and Emerson, that had led all the way to the pasture, where Sharon and Madge, bringing in the cows, ran like the wind to keep from stepping on something. “Nobody wanted it,” said Caroline. “There was nothing worth saving. When they get the stumps burned, Bryan'll plant it in soybeans. See there?” Sharon looked to where she pointed. A mixed patch of weeds, grain, and tall corn, including several hollyhocks, formed a small island. “That's where the barns sat, and the manure.”

Sharon continued to stare, her tongue between her dry lips, pondering the imponderable. Into thin air. How did one measure air?

“I told Madge you could drive right by and not miss it.” Did she feel any loss? Was it the emptiness that evoked the presence of Cora? Not her image, not her person, but the great alarming silence of her nature, the void behind her luminous eyes. It had frightened Sharon. Had she sensed a similar hollow in her own being? Cora Atkins had been for silence, and she would not have countenanced impertinent questions.
When she felt the deep silence of her soul threatened she had struck out with her hairbrush. All those unanswered questions were now asked of Sharon.

The car moved away slowly, crunching the gravel. A machine, almost as large as a house, came slowly toward them through a field of grain. Blades wheeled as if it might fly. It cut a swath through the field that left nothing but stubble. A dark pane of tinted glass concealed the driver, if it had one. Such a monster need only keep moving to level houses, barns, trees, anything in its path.

“Poor Cora!” Sharon blurted.

“I'll never forgive her,” said Caroline. “Never.”

“Caroline!” Sharon cried. She almost barked it, but her eagerness to hear more shamed her.

“She never complained. An animal would have complained. She would still be in all that rubble if they hadn't moved her.”

A hand to her eyes, Sharon felt her head was splitting. The air trapped about her face smelled of flint.

“At least I can complain,” Caroline said. “She couldn't.”

With an effort, Sharon said, “She
could
have, Caroline, but she simply
wouldn't
.”

“Could or wouldn't, she didn't,” said Caroline, “and now she's dead.”

Once at the edge of town, within sight of the open fields, Ned and Madge Kibbee's house now backed up to an alley of commercial buildings that faced another street. Sharon would not have recognized it. The clapboards
had been covered with green asbestos shingles to the height of the windows. A glassed-in porch the width of the house, with a metal awning to shade the doorway, had been added to the rear. In the side yard the stump of a tree was mounted with a teeter-totter. A larger and newer house loomed on the west, the shades drawn at the upper windows. The whine of a power machine, in a shop on the alley, rose to a siren pitch, then subsided.

“Daddy's retired,” said Caroline, “but don't bring it up.” She removed a bag of groceries from the car, then walked ahead of Sharon to the rear flight of steps. A pair of men's shoes, caked with grime and sawdust, sat left of the stoop. “Mom's probably in her bedroom, where it's cooler,” Caroline said, but Madge was not in her bedroom. She heaved up from a couch covered with a sheet, and steadied herself by gripping the back of a chair. A summer-type frock, with a bright luau pattern, covered her like a hastily wrapped parcel. In her broad fleshy face the features had diminished, the eyes receded. A tremor was visible in the lenses of her glasses. As Sharon approached, she saw that Madge's eyes brimmed with tears.

“Why, she's pretty as ever!” Madge said to Caroline, her voice so firm it startled Sharon.

“I'm an old lady,” Sharon replied.

“But you're a
little
old lady!” Her shoulders heaved. She might have been sobbing. She drew her hand from the back of the chair to cover her eyes. This show of emotion was relieved by Caroline.

“Where's Daddy?” she asked.

“He's napping. When it's so hot he don't sleep at night.” A shadow stretched on the floor between them. Madge said, “Blanche, this is your Aunt Sharon. Sharon, you remember Blanche?”