Plains Song (9 page)

Anna Pilic was good with the little girls, but her strange speech troubled Cora. When she spoke to them, what was she saying? Sharon Rose often prattled it back. When Anna sang to them, Cora listened, pondering what she heard. Anna's love of music touched her, and brought to Cora's mind pleasures she had forgotten. Singing need not be confined to the church, but might be played and enjoyed in the home. The wife of her uncle, in Ohio, owned and played a foot-pedaled pump organ. In the catalogues Cora browsed in, when she had a moment, both pianos and organs were offered for sale that would play by themselves or could be played on the keys in the ordinary manner. She spent weeks wondering just where in the house it should sit. The living room offered a corner, free of windows, where it might sit at an angle facing the listeners. Both Orion and Emerson might be encouraged to spend more time there. Nor did she consult Emerson in this matter, since she would make the purchase with her own egg and butter income. That would help explain why, when it arrived, so little thought had been given as to how to get it into the house. The unused door at the front had to be taken off its hinges, and a ramp built to slide the piano from the wagon. Orion supervised the move, in Emerson's absence, and was the first to sit on the stool that came with it, and puzzle over the directions. He was mechanically minded, if not musical. Ten player rolls had come with it, in their boxes with the labels, and before
Emerson had come in from the field and paused at the barn to ponder what he was hearing, Anna Pilic had mastered the art of sitting on the stool seat while pedaling, and reversing the music to the point where it started. The volume proved to be deafening. Cora had left the house to let the breeze cool her flushed face. In the outdoors it was less alarming, and she could give attention to what she was hearing. Where had she heard it before? Her mouth went dry and her eyes filmed over, as they did when listening to hymns. She did not fully grasp what she had done until she saw Emerson transfixed at the barn door, assuring her that for a family limited to girls she had chosen right.

As he did when bewildered, Emerson stood gazing at the swallow-streaked sky. He liked birds. In the field he often paused to attend their song. He listened till he felt sure he knew what it was and that he had nothing to fear from it. After Belle little would surprise him, even if it was a man who did it. Before proceeding toward the house he stopped to wet his face at the pump.

The nearest school being a mile and a half due east, on a road that often disappeared during the winter, the Atkins girls did not attend school until they were big enough to walk it. Almost seven, Madge delayed for a semester while she waited for Sharon Rose to grow bigger. Madge was not tall, but she was chubby, and seemed to be impervious to heat and cold. She might forget to put the mittens, on cords to her sleeves, back on her hands if they happened to slip off. With the first thaws of spring, she would take off her shoes and wear them around her neck on the tied
laces. She seemed to be made of a different material than Sharon Rose. If it was hot, Sharon Rose suffered from prickly heat, and her face would be flushed with streaks of color. If it was cold, her lips turned blue as a cake of ice. Anyone who saw her took pity on her and led her forward to a place near the fire, where, in no time at all, she suffered from the heat and would have to withdraw.

Madge's eyes were thought to be like buttons, or raisins stuck into the dough of a raw sugar cookie. For the whites of her eyes to be seen, she had to hold her breath until they nearly popped. In contrast, the orbs of Sharon Rose were so large it stretched the lids thin to conceal them. Was this one of the reasons she seldom blinked? She also had the disconcerting habit of sleeping with her eyelids half open, revealing only the whites. In the winter, her little face a snow mask, she was more like a trapped wild creature than a person, the blue of her eyes so intense they looked black. Seated at the table, or in one of the small front seats of Miss Mittlehofer's schoolroom, Sharon Rose returned each gaze without blinking. Of course, some children are like that, but not in the manner of Sharon Rose. Miss Mittlehofer sometimes feared she might stop blinking altogether. What it did was give her an air of composure that others found disturbing. Nervous little boys would turn from her gaze to run hooting around her like puppies. Seated at her desk, her little hands clasped in a manner that was not at all childlike, her eyes would follow Miss Mittlehofer with spellbound attention. One might observe the same
thing in retarded children, or those proved to be hard of hearing. Sharon Rose, however, carried tunes in her head she heard only once. In a small, shrill voice, she would recite the multiplication tables as if they were jingles. Nor was it the usual defects that led Sharon Rose to impress her peers as something special. Her nose bled without being thumped, and she ate snow like it was sugar. Madge was so average no one would have seen her if she hadn't been there, looking after Sharon Rose. A puppy and a kitten would hardly have been stranger together than this plump child and her companion. People had to be told they were cousins, not sisters, but when one or the other was mentioned, they were known as the Atkins girls. Fayrene Dee, poor thing—named by Orion after one of Belle's sisters—might as well have been in another family. Cora was too busy to stand in one place long enough for the child to get a grip on her. Madge and Sharon Rose were enough for Emerson, who considered Fayrene one girl too many. Orion lived with his dogs, and Cora could see in his manner that he blamed the child for Belle's death.

Madge and Sharon Rose were so used to each other they resented sharing anything with Fayrene, especially Sharon Rose. The cruelness of children astonished Cora, since it seemed so at odds with their gentle natures. Sharon Rose would go out of her way to give Fayrene pain. It perplexed Cora to sense that the punishment she gave Fayrene pleased her. Was it the wild blood of her hillbilly mother? It meant nothing to her that Fayrene was her sister. Being so much alone, Fayrene
was slow to talk. She attached herself to Emerson, who didn't want her, but out of habit he became accustomed to her, even though she reminded him of Orion. The child would toddle after him in the yard, or let him spoon-feed her at the table. If Emerson scooped her up, Sharon Rose would squeal and ask to be put down. She didn't like to be tickled, or have her face scratched by Emerson's beard. Tickling her, he once said, “You a cat or a kitten?”

“I'm a cat!” she cried, and clawed her little hands at him. Emerson made light of it, pinching her bottom, but it was the last time he scooped her up. It was no loss to Sharon Rose, but a real gain for Fayrene.

Whenever he had the chance, Emerson liked to say that when he came in from the field he wondered whose farm it was. People who knew Cora could believe that. There were three girls in the family, no sons, and a gasoline motor now pumped the water that was piped across the yard to her garden. The next thing he knew, it would sprinkle her grass. What she had in mind, and had explained to Orion, was water enough to flush a toilet inside the house. What difference would there be between the farm and the city if people kept it up?

At the state fair in Lincoln she had seen a gas-run contraption that would light up a house, and that would be next. For himself, Emerson didn't want it. The bulbs burned out, they were too bright to read by, and you couldn't turn them up and down like a lamp, only on and off. It pleased him to say that to people and listen to the comments that followed, no other
woman, known to them personally, being more highly respected than Cora. She churned the best country butter, she raised the best sweet corn, and her new white Leghorn eggs ran larger and cleaner than those from the dairy people in Columbus. Of all she made, she never spent a nickel on herself.

Player rolls of the better class of music were piled five tiers high on the top of the piano, and the noise that once seemed deafening was music to which she had grown accustomed. The stout-legged Madge could pump it by sitting far forward and gripping under the keyboard to give her leverage, but Sharon Rose could sit erect on the stool and tinkle out pieces using all ten of her fingers. It was not to be believed, but she did it, with the help of Ernst Kreidel, a piano tuner. He would sit or stoop beside her, humming the tunes, reading the music, until Sharon Rose caught on to it. She was a
Wunderkind,
he said, meaning no harm. Not to intrude upon them, two fingers at her lips, the left hand supporting the right arm at the elbow, Cora would stand at the door to the kitchen in a transport of wonder. That the piano played by itself she accepted. These were intricacies beyond her grasping. But that Sharon Rose sat there, her thin legs dangling, much too short to reach the pedals, and with her tiny hands made this music, reassured Cora that divine power might reveal itself in what was merely human. The plump Madge, careful to make no disturbance, stood at the door with its oval pane of glass, one of her chubby fingers tracing the etched floral pattern. The only special interest Madge seemed to have was
Sharon Rose. After the lesson the children would sit in the cobhouse and play with their dolls.

Cora's efficient way of doing things for herself was not, perhaps, the best way to bring up female children. Told to fetch cobs, Madge and Sharon Rose might be gone for half an hour. Madge was willing, of course, but she was easily distracted, and watching Sharon Rose was her special talent. The girls were good at pulling taffy, making popcorn, coloring Easter eggs, and scraping the inside of the fudge pan. Cora could not rest herself while listening to the sounds of others at work. Madge would surely have learned to sew and mend faster, but Sharon Rose's little fingers, so nimble on the keyboard, burned themselves, cut themselves, and dropped things without handles like plates and eggs. Knowing it would happen, Cora was soon there to shoo them out of the kitchen and clean up the mess. Sometimes the little girls could be heard giggling beneath the cloth that covered the dining room table, poor little Fayrene wondering what it was all about. Actually, she was more at her ease with the grownups, who lifted her to their laps or sat her on the backs of horses, than she was with the puzzling world of her sister. Why did she giggle? Fayrene was too young to know, too shy to ask.

These were good years for Cora. Many things confirmed her feeling that the rightness of their lives was His rightness. Chickens, people, and eggs had their appointed places, chores their appointed time, changes their appointed seasons, the night its appointed sleep. Emerson exhibited hogs and apples at
the fair in Lincoln, from where he returned with his face nicked by a barber. He liked to lie out horizontal in the chair, with a hot towel on his face, and be raised or lowered. It seemed to Cora he belched less at the table now, and deferred to her in moments of decision. At the stove, where he scratched his matches, or at the screen, where he dried his hands, he might ask her opinion on the Leghorns as layers. It would be his opinion when she heard it next.

When Cora came to the screen, fanning the dead air with her apron, and gazed across the green lawn with its pattern of posts and wickets, the striped balls gleaming like eggs painted for Easter, the sad keening of the mourning doves filled her with a sorrowful pleasure, more satisfying to her nature than a blithe, careless happiness. In the chill of the morning, or the cool of the evening, the air heavy with the drone of insects, Cora's contentment might be so great it aroused her guilt. What had she done to be favored with such peace of mind?

At the school on Friday afternoons, Sharon Rose played music with Leah Sobotka, who could read and write in English but hardly speak it. Leah wore her yellow hair in braids that often got in the way as she played the cello. Madge would stand at the piano and turn the pages of the music for Sharon. It vexed Emerson to hear how little interest Madge showed in boys. She was now a plump, strapping girl, and when she put up her hair she looked like a young woman. Sharon Rose he put clean out of his mind when she visited a friend, in Columbus, and came back with her
hair cut like a man's, short at the back.

Fayrene had the room off the kitchen to herself, hot in the summer but cozy over the winter. When she heard the creak of the boards in the ceiling, she opened up the stove drafts, put kerosene on the cobs and water in the kettle, and went back to bed. Time had proved that it was best to let Cora light the fire and start the day by herself. Both of the older girls stayed out of the kitchen till the food was cooked.

Cora was so long accustomed to doing things by herself she found it irksome if someone tried to help her. She carried her elbows high, even with her hands empty, and often caught the girls where they claimed to be tender. The meal might be delayed while they waited for Emerson to make his way back from the outbilly, wash and dry his hands, then drink the pitcher of buttermilk to relieve his stomach. In his own opinion he suffered from the weight of undigested cuds of chewing tobacco. They weighed on him at night, but after drinking the buttermilk, and several rumbling belches, they were gone. Whether Sharon Rose said that Emerson should eat with his pigs, or said something that merely implied it, it was Cora's house and a compromise was reached that he would drink his buttermilk away from the table. Emerson didn't let it rile him. A girl with Belle as a mother and Orion for a father could be expected to act mighty peculiar. Cora served hot biscuits, on the flat side, oatmeal cooked to the texture of taffy, cream thick as syrup, eggs fried hard in bacon grease, bread, butter, honey, and coffee. Except for grace, said by one of the
girls, there was no talk. In the winter a lamp burned at the center of the table, the wick curled in a pool of oil, the flame reflected in the orbs of Sharon Rose like those of a cat. Emerson couldn't tell you whether she blinked or not, since he wasn't going to pay her that kind of attention. If she thought people might stare at her she wouldn't blink at all.