“I’ll love you forever.”
“Long as that?” he murmured.
“Yes, and if there’s anything after that, I’ll love you then too.”
He told me that I was the wife of his soul, and I wept on his belly. In the tall grass by the road, mourning doves understood. Whitman’s words scrolled across my brain. “To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fullness …”
Only when the sun was nearing eleven o’clock did we untangle ourselves, fearing Dora’s sudden return. Then a reluctant unlacing of fingers, one final kiss, hasty dressing, Roland helping with my buttons. In moments I was headed back across the road, sobbing and shaking my clothes free of grass and dust.
After the midday meal and the washing up, I walked to town, memorizing the landscape as I went. My first stop was the Milwaukee depot. From there, I headed to Main Street, dropping my letters into the outgoing slot in the post office lobby. There. It was done. Now I could tell Emma.
The street outside was ghostly, miniature cyclones of dust rising from the hard-packed earth as the wind blew down the bleached and empty corridor. From the post office, I trudged back into the country as the sun reached two-thirty in the sky. It threw a slanting light I have seen only on the prairie in late September and October, light with a tinge of amber and a tincture of despair. Given the smallest opportunity, it will sunder your heart.
When I had watered the garden and seen to it that plenty of corn was strewn about for the chickens, I went in search of Emma. Henry and Jake were sitting on the front porch smoking their pipes. Not finding her elsewhere, I went to Emma’s bedroom door and called softly. Then I heard her stirring. “Yes?” She opened the door, straightening her skirt.
“Did I wake you?”
“No. It’s time I was up.” She led the way to the kitchen. “I wanta chip some ice off the block for a glass of cool water,” she said, crossing to the icebox.
We sat at the table, fingering the sweat on the side of our glasses.
“You wanted to say something,” she ventured.
“I’m leaving,” I told her. “Next Saturday, but please don’t tell Roland or Dora.”
She nodded. “I knew something was in the wind.”
“You know I love you and Henry. It’s nothing to do with you. You’ve been good to me, and I love the farm.”
“It’s Roland,” she said.
I blinked.
“I knew from the start, something was gonna happen. Then, Fourth of July, it was there to be seen. I don’t think you could help it.” She held the glass against her forehead, rolling it back and forth. “You’re the one I would have chosen for our Roland, but some things that are meant to be can never be. Maybe there’s a lesson in that, but I don’t know what it is.”
The room under the eaves was stifling. I closed the door and stripped. Lying naked on the bed, I wept.
When I was done, I stood before the photograph of Serena and Denton. “I’m going back where I came from,” I told them. “Being near you again is the only positive outcome of this journey. All the rest is pain.”
Later, Emma came up to tell me I didn’t have to come down to supper. She’d bring me something. A thousand fresh tears. She was my sister, my aunt, my cousin. She and Henry were my family. Around eight, she appeared with a plate of chicken, corn, and sliced tomatoes. She sat down at the side of the bed. “Do you have money?” she asked.
“I’ve saved most of my wages, and my friend Professor Cromwell sent money now and again, you remember.”
“What will I do without you?”
“Don’t worry. Plenty of girls would give their eyeteeth to work here.”
She looked away and shook her head.
I lay staring at the ceiling, empty of thought, full of tears.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
On the farm, Emma kept silent about my leaving. But when we drove to town Monday morning, she spoke with two or three women and afterward placed an ad at the Standard Ledger. Between the conversations and the ad, she hoped to find my replacement.
“Won’t Dora and Roland see the paper?” I didn’t want Roland to know I was going until I’d left.
“I doubt they see it once a month.”
Before returning to the farm, we stopped at the Harvester Arms Hotel and ordered coffee and doughnuts.
“I thought this place’d give us a chance to have a quiet chat, but now I can’t think of anything to say,” Emma told me. “I guess that’s the way of things. You can’t plan to talk; it has to come by itself.”
“What I’ve been thinking,” I said, “is Dora needs to learn how to can. They’ve still got vegetables in the garden, and so do we. Why don’t we ask her to come over and learn?”
Emma nodded, taking a bite of doughnut and wiping crumbs from her lips. “We’ll pick up jars while we’re in town. She likely hasn’t any, except what we’ve brought over with somethin’ inside.”
On the way home, Emma dropped me off at the Allens’ driveway. “So you can see how she takes to the idea.”
Dora was hauling water to the garden. In my chest, a small joy blossomed. The neophyte had begun taking hold of farm life. I grabbed another pail from the back porch and carried it to the trough.
At the kitchen table later, I watched Dora struggle with bread dough that wanted to stick to the board, despite its floured surface. Six weeks ago I would have taken a hand, but I’d seen that many things were best conquered alone.
“If you want to do this,” I said, referring to the canning, “come over after breakfast tomorrow.”
She nodded.
“Emma says we’ll start with cucumbers. We’ve got a second crop and you do too. Bring your cukes and the jars you have.”
A year from now, Dora might warm the breakfast coffee for me. If I were here. Right now, as Emma would say, showing the bread dough who was boss was all Dora could handle.
“Did I see you in the wagon with Moses yesterday, around noon?” I asked. I couldn’t tell her that I had information of her churchgoing from Roland. “Looked like you were coming from town.”
She paused in her kneading and, using the back of her hand, brushed her hair from her face. “I went to church with Moses.”
“Good for you. Not that you went to church, but that you went to town. Was it scary?”
“It was sick-scary. In front of the Catholic church, I almost lost my breakfast. If my folks ever saw me going into a Catholic church …”
“They’d double-disown you.”
She giggled. “Oh, worse than that. They’d probably shoot me.” The dough was coming together now, smooth and looking like something that might turn out to be bread.
I grabbed a bowl from the shelf, greased the inside with drippings, and handed it to her. She in turn greased the ball of bread dough and put it into the bowl. She drew a clean cloth from the drawer, dampened it, and laid it over the bowl, then carried the dough to the porch and set it on a table in the sun.
At each step, I silently congratulated and hated her. Maybe “hated” is too strong—but my envy and sorrow were wide and deep. I held clenched fists between my thighs.
“Will you go to town again?” I asked.
She hesitated. “I think I will. Maybe to the Methodist church this time, Roland and me.”
The next morning, as we worked, Emma told Dora, “Ruby says you went to church with Moses. If you ever wanta go with Henry and me, you’re welcome.”
“I think I’ll get Roland to go.”
“Well, if he’s ever tied up, come across the road.”
Eventually Dora would replace me in Emma and Henry’s world. Self-pity wrung my insides.
Later, I turned to Whitman, but he offered no comfort. Whitman would tell me that I was impossibly shallow or selfish. He would say, look around; the world is full of beauty and friendship and books. And all that was true, but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t the warm, solid body, the loving words, the singular, requisite love.
At the same time, I couldn’
t stay here to suffer like Prometheus to be chained upon the rock—my heart, not my liver, daily devoured.
Friday evening, Emma cooked my favorite dinner, a beef roast surrounded by potatoes and carrots and onions, Indian pudding for dessert. She let Jake in on our secret, since I would be gone the next day. We told him that I had a deathly ill great-aunt in Illinois. That much was true, though I certainly wasn’t returning to Illinois because of her. Nothing Professor Cromwell had written indicated that she cared a fig about my welfare or my whereabouts. Even calling her “Aunt” seemed incongruous.
After dinner, Emma said, “We’ve got a little going-away present for you,” and she disappeared to the bedroom. Returning, she carried a tiny box covered with blue velvet.
Handing it to me, she said, “You will come visit, won’t you? You gotta promise.” I nodded, holding back tears, and opened the box. Inside, wedged into white satin, was a small gold ring with the initial R on a engraved shield.
“Put it on,” Emma said. “I wanta make sure it fits. But first, look inside it.”
I tipped the ring to read, “Remember us.” And then I wept. Would there ever be an end to the weeping?
Professor Cromwell and Mrs. Bullfinch were seeking a room and employment for me. A rooming house might be best for my lodging. I had enough money to see me through until I found work and, thanks to Emma, I had skills to offer. I could work in a restaurant or hotel or laundry. I could even be a housekeeper, if I wasn’t thought too young.
Saturday morning was a wrench of separation, of doing each thing for the last time, gathering eggs, tossing grain to the chickens. Jake had already milked the cows, but I visited them before he let them out of their stanchions. I would miss the icy mornings with them, our breath clouding together in the air.
Emma packed food for me in an old carpetbag, enough to feed me for several days, though I would reach Beardsley the next afternoon. Henry drove the three of us to town in the automobile. Again, my mind took photographs of everything: the two farms; the cemeteries where the orphan dog had roamed and Lily Allen was buried; and dusty Main Street, bustling with town people at their shopping, in and out of Lundeen’s Dry Goods, Rabel’s Meat Market, and Kolchak’s Dray and Livery.
At the depot, I gave Emma the remaining photograph. “If there’s anyone you think would like it,” I said. Then I told her and Henry that I would come apart if they lingered over goodbyes. They nodded and, with much employment of handkerchiefs, they left me on a wooden bench in the depot, with fifteen minutes remaining until my train departed. Since the passenger car was not full, I had a double seat to myself. I sat at the window and looked down Main Street, hoping to catch sight of Henry’s Model T, but it was lost among buggies and wagons and other automobiles.
The blessed thing about trains is that they rock you to sleep, and I fell into a doze of tears and fatigue, lying across the seat, my head pillowed on my bag. It was early afternoon when I woke and we were in Iowa. The Iowa border being no more than a few miles from Harvester, it was not surprising that the landscape looked exactly like the country around Harvester, flat prairie divided—neat as pins, Emma would say—into farms and groves and lakes.
As I stared out the window, one farm would strike me as resembling the Schoonover spread, another the Allen place. I viewed the countryside through those lenses on the way to Beardsley. Were these trees as lovely as the cottonwoods in Henry’s grove, trees that spoke in whispering-sibyl voices, trees he’d told me were of the deltoides variety? Henry knew things like that. Deltoides.
• • •
The next morning, as we approached the outskirts of Chicago, the train slowed—by regulation, the conductor told me—and I could see how huge the city was. Few people I’d known in Beardsley, apart from my parents and Professor Cromwell, had ever been to Chicago. Mrs. Bullfinch had dreamt of it, she said, but it hadn’t come to pass, not yet.
I had to change trains and railway stations in Chicago, something that hadn’t been necessary on my earlier railway trips. I wasn’t frightened. At each step, people were kind.
I would have liked to spend more time in the city, more time than I had between trains. Maybe one day. In my dreams I would wander the city with Roland. We’d explore the place where the great World’s Fair had been, and we’d swim in Lake Michigan.
The crowds dizzied me in their numbers and their scurrying. I didn’t think I’d want to live in a place where you had to rush so, but I wouldn’t mind a visit to look around and take in all the … differentia, yes, that was the word.
Despite their pace, the people looked perfectly normal, and those who helped me were perfectly friendly. It was reassuring to know that. Most people from little towns and farms thought city people were different in some indefinable but probably negative way.
When I was settled on my second train, fortunate again in a double seat, I was exhausted but pleased to know how to make the transfer. In my dreams, again, I’d be able to show Roland, and he’d be impressed by my sophistication.
Though the train was moving, we were still in the city, and the clicking of the wheels was quieter than it would be when we reached the country. The conductor had taken my ticket and I was rummaging through the food Emma had packed. I wasn’t hungry, but neither did I want Emma’s kindness going to waste. Maybe someone else would like a sandwich.
Across the aisle, a young woman was gazing out the window. She was red haired and tiny, barely five feet, I would guess. And though I couldn’t see her face, her figure and movements said she was probably about my age. As we finally left the outskirts of Chicago behind, she turned away from the window and I saw that she was pleasant looking, with a happy smile.
“I’m Alice,” she said.
“I’m Ruby,” I said. “I have so much food. Could you eat a sandwich or an apple—or both?”
“I’d love a sandwich and an apple. I only had toast and coffee. We had to hurry. My Aunt Alice—I was named for her—was afraid I’d miss the train.”
“You live in Chicago?” I asked, digging out a beef sandwich and an apple and handing them to her, along with the napkin Emma had included.
“Oh, no. I live in Winstead. I’ve been visiting my aunt in the city.” She set the apple beside her on the seat, unwrapped the sandwich, and took a bite. “This is delicious. I can’t thank you enough. Aren’t you going to eat?”
“I’m not hungry.”
I gave her time to eat, then asked, “What do you do when you come to Chicago? I was just between trains. I’ve never been in a city before.”
“Well, this time,” she began, and her voice and face were awash with delight, “I came to buy a wedding dress.”
“Oh my.” I didn’t want to hear any more. My eyes filled and I dug into my bag for a damp and wadded handkerchief.
“Did I say something wrong?”
But I turned away and lay my head down. When the train reached Beardsley, Alice had already left, folding Emma’s napkin beside me.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Professor Cromwell was waiting on the platform as the train pulled into Beardsley. Serena had once described him as a natty dresser—nothing flashy, but neat and fashionable. This autumn afternoon, he wore tan wool trousers, a tweed jacket, and a driving cap cocked at an angle. As I alit, he removed the cap and came forward to shake my hand then grab the two carpetbags, one with the food, the other, clothes.
“I have a little trunk they’ll be unloading from the freight car,” I told him. He nodded and we walked down the platform to where the freight wagon stood. As freight was being lowered onto the wagon, I pointed out my trunk. The man in charge picked it up and followed us to the parking area at the end of the depot, Professor Cromwell indicating his automobile—a Cadillac roadster, he told me. I admired it. It was sleeker and more light-hearted than Henry’s Model T. Roland would love it.
“You gave up your buggy,” I said.
“No, I still have it. Also the horse,” he told me as my trunk was loaded onto the back of
the roadster. “The Cadillac is fine for town, but if I have to drive into the country, I still prefer the horse, at least on the roads around here,” he continued, handing me into the automobile.
Since the top was down, I fished in my bag for a scarf. The town looked bigger than I remembered. “How big is Beardsley?” I asked.
“Twenty thousand or so, I think.”
The streets were brick or granite setts, a few paved, so that dust didn’t rise around us as it did in Harvester. Still, my heart was hundreds of miles behind me.
“Where are we headed?”
“As you wished, I found you a rooming house. It’s near Mrs. Bullfinch and the house where you lived. I thought you’d like that.”
Indeed, it was on the same block as my little house and Mrs. Bullfinch’s! Though on the opposite side of the street and several down. A big white clapboard, it had an open porch that reached around three sides, where rockers, some wicker, some metal, lined up, so many maidens waiting to dance.
A Mrs. Lander—slender, gray haired, and well kept up, with the melting blue eyes of a fairy godmother—was the owner, and she met us at the door, greeting us with considerable warmth. “Professor Cromwell, so good to see you again. And this must be little Ruby.” She took my hand and gave me a searching look, as if she could divine some important element of my character by studying my face. And perhaps she could if she’d been in the rooming business many years. “That is how Professor Cromwell referred to you. He wanted a big, pleasant room for ‘little Ruby.’”
Letting go of my hand, Mrs. Lander turned to lead us up a carpeted open stairway, saying, “You are in luck, my dear. Professor Cromwell rented the room for you just as Miss Hoover was moving out. Miss Hoover was with us several years, so we were all exceedingly pleased for her when she found a nice eligible widower, Mr. Hardwick. And she didn’t have to change her monogram. Very clever of her to hunt down a fellow with her same last initial.”
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