The kitchen is filled with the aroma of roast beef and fresh-baked rhubarb pie. Just before he left, Eldon noticed the pie cooling by the window, and asked Caroline if she’d forgotten his mother didn’t like rhubarb pie. She remembered, of course, but she loved the taste of spring rhubarb, and it didn’t make sense, she explained, to buy apples that were out of season, or raisins that cost so much. Eldon gave her one of his stony looks and told her she’d better have something else in mind for his mother’s dessert.
She opens the refrigerator, takes out a chubby pint of cream, pours some into a bowl and sets about spinning the crank on the mixer until the cream thickens to stiff peaks. She adds two heaping tablespoons of icing sugar and a scant splash of vanilla and whisks it again, hoping the whipped cream will have the desired effect and moisten the chocolate cake she baked on Tuesday so Elvina won’t notice it’s gone stale.
During the week they eat in the kitchen, but on Sunday she sets the dining-room table with her only good dishes, three of four Royal Albert china plates that belonged to her mother. When Elvina lived with them, Vera always laid out a lace tablecloth, English bone china, and a set of fine silverware she polished on the first day of each month. Elvina took them all with her, and Vera, too, when she moved out. Neither Elvina nor Eldon suggested hiring a girl to help Caroline with her chores and it is now Caroline’s duty, this Sunday supper ritual, although she never complains. It’s a small price to pay for having her own kitchen.
She is mashing the potatoes when she hears the crunch of gravel as Eldon’s truck pulls into the yard. Peering through the curtain over the kitchen sink, she sees Eldon dash around to open the truck door for his mother. He likes to make a great show of gallantry in front of his mother and Elvina revels in the fuss he makes over her. To see them, you’d think they were Prince Philip and the Queen. Eldon no longer opens Caroline’s door, she’s noted, stopping the practice shortly after the wedding ring was placed on her finger.
“I’ve just told Eldon he must speak to his councillor about that washboard road,” Elvina says after they’ve come in. “Who is it now? Oh yes, didn’t these people re-elect that Ukrainian fellow, what’s his name again, Eldon?” She wrinkles her nose as though she’s detected an unpleasant odour in Caroline’s kitchen. “Kalinoski, Kalinochuk, some such name, who can know? None of them are easily pronounced. Anyway, something must be done about the road. It’s rough enough to rattle one’s teeth out of one’s head.”
“Only if they’re not properly attached,” Caroline mutters under her breath. Eldon raises his brow and frowns but Elvina does not seem to have heard Caroline’s reference to the false teeth of which she is so proud.
“I’m parched,” Elvina says. “Be a dear, Caroline, and bring me some water. Ice-cold, mind you. I don’t care to drink dishwater.”
Eldon and Elvina retire to the dining room while Caroline spoons out the potatoes and carries them to the dining room along with Elvina’s water.
“Reverend Williams’s sermon was painfully dull this morning, didn’t you think so, Eldon?” Elvina is saying when Caroline returns with the roast beef and beans.
“Not particularly,” Eldon says, and Caroline is surprised. He rarely disagrees with his mother. “How so?”
“Oh, he went on and on and on. Love thy neighbour as thyself. I mean, really, how can one truly do this when our neighbours these days are so overreaching?”
Eldon seems relieved by his mother’s words. “Oh, of course. Now I know what you’re getting at. I agree with you completely, but I would hardly call his sermon dull. It actually got my blood boiling a time or two. There are some people who just don’t realize they must be kept in their place.”
Caroline puts a serving spoon in the potatoes and Elvina reaches for them, heaping a generous helping on her plate while Eldon helps himself to a sweet pickle, eating it with his fingers. Neither one of them waits until all the food is served or for Caroline to join them at the table.
“Precisely. Take that young Bilyk, for instance. Who do they think they are, buying up more land around here? Before you know it, more of their kind will move in and you’ll be surrounded by them. Ukrainians as far as the eye can see!”
“The thing is, Morgan didn’t even come to me so I could make him an offer, no different than Pete Tilley did all those years ago. When I asked him about it, he said he’d given his word to young Bilyk in March. I told him I’d have offered him a hundred dollars more for it, but he didn’t seem to care.”
“People don’t give us the respect we deserve,” Elvina says, glancing at Caroline as though she’s as guilty as the rest of the neighbours. “What kind of fool wouldn’t want more money?”
Eldon shakes his head. “Morgan told me I don’t need the land anyway. Young Nick is just starting out, he said, and could use the extra acres for pasture. It seems the boy has a way with cattle and an easy hand with birthing. Bilyk helped him deliver a healthy set of twins during that last winter snowstorm and didn’t take any money for doing it, either.”
Caroline takes her place at the table. Her face feels flushed and it may be, considering the way her heart skipped a beat when Elvina mentioned Nick Bilyk. She was unaware that Eldon had spoken to Morgan about the land and was glad Nick bought it before Eldon had a chance to outbid him. She passes the beef roast to Eldon to carve, bows her head and silently offers thanks. For all their haughty ways, Elvina and Eldon don’t say grace at their own table.
She looks up and senses Elvina watching her as she fills her plate.
“I smell fresh paint. What have you been up to now?” Elvina has the same disapproving look on her face she has every time she discovers some small change Caroline has made to the house. She still seems to consider it her domain.
Caroline painted the kitchen cupboards a glossy white last summer and, at the time, Eldon told her there was no need to paint them on the inside. But the paint was chipped and worn and she didn’t care for the old colour, a yellowish green that reminded her of dugout algae, so she brought home a quart of paint without Eldon knowing and started repainting them.
“I thought they needed freshening up.”
“It seems you’re spending much of your energy changing things that are just as well left alone,” Elvina says curtly. “The painting and papering of the upstairs rooms, for instance. Pink walls and rose-patterned paper for Eldon’s old room? It’s hardly the choice I would have made. I’m surprised you allowed it, Eldon.”
Caroline looks up to see Eldon concentrating on his dinner plate, scraping his beans into a pile. He doesn’t want his mother to know they often sleep in separate rooms. A few months ago Eldon told Caroline her tossing and turning was keeping him awake; it was important he be completely rested, working with dangerous machinery all day, he said, so he suggested she move back into his old room. Caroline didn’t mind in the least. His snoring disturbed her and she preferred the room at the front of the house, where she could look out to the road and see the neighbours come and go. She packed up his old trophies from the shelves, replaced them with her books and trinkets, and spread a bright quilt, hand-stitched by her mother, on the bed. Eldon moved in her dressing table and bought a leather chair to put in its place in his room.
“It was about time to pack up those old trophies. Gone are the glory days,” Eldon says.
“That may very well be, but I don’t see why she needs to dress your room up so, with pink flowers on the walls. And besides, it’s meant to be a boy’s room. It will only have to be redone when your son is born. And heaven only knows why that’s taking so long. You would think I’d have a grandson to bounce on my knee by now.” She puckers her lips and looks Caroline up and down, as if she’s some sort of defective brood mare Eldon has purchased and cannot return.
Caroline grips the seat of her chair and bites the inside of her cheek, breathing hard. It’s not helping, this pressure you’re putting on me. Her father’s been harping at her, too, suggesting it’s something she’s doing wrong, making it i
mpossible for a baby to grow inside her. “Just like your mother for all of those years before you finally came,” he’s told her.
“Henry McPhee said there’d be a son and there’s still no sign of one,” Elvina continues and dabs her lips with a napkin. “You McPhees aren’t keeping up your side of the bargain.”
Caroline pushes away from the table, legs shaking, lips pressed together so tightly she can feel the blunt edge of her teeth. How she would love to give that woman a piece of her mind! Eldon’s secretive deal with her father infuriates her.
She found out about it in the spring of ’55, right after her wedding. She was helping her father as she often did, making meals and running errands for him when he needed a hand on the farm. There’d been a note on her father’s kitchen table that day, asking her to bring the new grain truck to Beulah’s field.
Beulah’s? The Webbs owned that farm, at least they had for as long as she could remember. Her father had a pining for that land and she distinctly remembered the heated arguments between her parents over the years about Jacob Beulah’s place.
“What are you doing here?” Caroline asked when she pulled up with the truck that day.
Her father opened the seed box and jumped down from the seeder. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Well, I can see what you’re doing, what I meant was, what are you doing here, in Eldon’s field?”
“Sowing wheat,” he said, kneeling down on the ground and brushing aside the soil to check the depth of the seed. “This is my farm now.”
She felt her blood grow hot, rush to her face. “Your farm? You’re telling me you had the money to buy —”
“Don’t go flying off the handle,” her father interrupted. “No one’s saying I bought it.” He glared at her, as if she had no business questioning him about such matters. “Eldon signed it over to me before your wedding, if you need to know.”
“He just gave it to you?”
“Temporarily, I suppose,” he said, turning away. He stepped behind the truck and began removing planks from the end gate. “It’ll be his again anyway, one day, when I’m gone and I’ve left it to you. God willing, your son will farm this land someday.”
“What?” Caroline said. What he’d done — he and Eldon — suddenly dawned on her as she remembered that Indian summer day, after her mother had passed, when Eldon stopped by to speak with her father. She’d taken her leave willingly when her father had asked and set off for the mail, never thinking the business Eldon had to discuss with her father was the gifting of Beulah’s land to her father in exchange for her hand.
Jacob Beulah’s property had been the first piece of land her father had purchased as a young man; her grandfather had mortgaged the home place so he could buy it. When the crops were ravaged by consecutive years of grasshoppers and drought and the price of wheat fell during the Depression, her father couldn’t keep up with the payments and the bank threatened to take not only Beulah’s land, but the homestead, too. He was forced to sell it to keep the rest of the farm afloat, although it pained him to no end to see it slip out of his hands. It was Eldon’s father who’d bought it; rich and well-established, he had the means to hang on and prosper during the tough times that threatened to sink more vulnerable farmers.
“I remember hearing Mum say, come hell or high water, you were bound and determined to get Beulah’s land back someday.”
“And so I did,” he said. He untied a metal pail from the tractor hitch and climbed up into the box. “I’ve wanted this piece of land back my whole life.”
“And this is how you did it,” Caroline said. The enormity of the deal he’d brokered stretched out before her like a vast, furrowed field — a section, a township, a range. He had bartered her away for one hundred and sixty acres.
Eldon pushes away his plate and leans back in his chair. “I don’t know about you, Mother, but I’m ready for my rhubarb pie. Caroline’s made something special just for you, haven’t you, Caroline?”
Caroline spears a bean with her fork, tastes it. It is cold, like the rest of her supper, and it lodges, like a plum pit, in her throat when she tries to swallow.
“Oh, what could it be?” Elvina asks excitedly. “Strawberry shortcake? I’ve been thinking the June berries might be ready.”
Caroline gets the whipped cream from the fridge, chooses a small saucer from the cupboard, takes the glass dome off the cake plate, and cuts out a small square of chocolate cake. She sees that it has a thin crown of furry mould and she considers scraping it off but changes her mind. Scooping out a dollop of whipped cream, she covers the bloom of blue mould and tucks a spoon in beside Elvina’s dessert before she carries it to the table.
“Here it is.” She smiles sweetly. “Something special. Just for you.”
JULY
“Wrap the bar soap in paper before putting it in with the rest of the groceries,” Ida Piper says to the box boy. He wraps and packs the soap then pushes aside a box, discreetly wrapped in brown paper, and packs a package of soda crackers into the cardboard box instead. He is new to the store, pimply faced with a shadow of fuzz above his lip, and he seems puzzled by the challenge of fitting all of Caroline’s items into one box. Ida shakes open a paper bag with a quick snap of her wrist and tucks the package the boy’s been avoiding into the bag herself. Caroline wonders what Ida thinks as she packs it; two years married and still needing the Kotex.
“Don’t load that box up with too many cans, the bottom will bust out before Mr. Webb gets it to his truck. That’s happened to him before and he was none too pleased.” The cash register chimes. “Twelve dollars and eighty-two cents.” The box boy reaches for the charge account cards sitting at the end of the counter. “No need for that,” Ida says. “The Webbs don’t charge.”
Caroline pulls two ten-dollar bills out of her wallet. Eldon insists on paying cash for everything. He thinks it beneath them to put anything, especially the weekly groceries, on credit. Caroline’s family shopped at Bud’s Mercantile, on the opposite side of the street, charging groceries and even goods like her school supplies and new winter boots, paying Bud up in the fall, when the crop came in.
“Here’s your change,” Ida says. “You’re in town earlier than usual. Hope that doesn’t mean you’ll miss the parade this afternoon.”
“No, we’re coming back in later just for the parade. Eldon wanted to get all the errands done first thing this morning, before it gets busy later, with nowhere to park.”
“Busiest Friday of the year in Ross Prairie, for sure,” Ida says. “And I heard it’s supposed to be the best parade in a while. Twenty-six floats and three marching bands.”
“I’m looking forward to it,” Caroline says. She puts her wallet back in her purse and heads out the door.
It is only eleven o’clock and already the temperature is above eighty degrees. The air is so thick and soupy she can almost taste it and, by the time she reaches Mavis Baylor’s dry-goods store at the other end of Main Street, she feels droplets of sweat trickling down the small of her back.
Caroline’s been looking forward to the parade and summer fair for weeks. It’s a two-day event, starting with a colourful parade and the opening of the exhibition hall. On Saturday, all the action takes place on the fairgrounds, with horse shows, chuck-wagon races, bingo, ball games, and a pig scramble for the children. There are concession stands selling hot dogs and popcorn and a small midway, with games of chance and a few rides. Caroline’s favourite is the Ferris wheel. She always went up with Susan and Alice, the three of them swinging their legs when they stopped at the very top, making the little car rock and Alice squeal and cover her eyes. Caroline loved to look out at the town from so high; miniature cars and trucks, lined up like a little boy’s toys, parked all the way down Gilbert Street as far as you could see. Last year, she asked Eldon to take her up, but he said it was pointless, riding around and around in circles like hamsters on a wheel.
A small bell rings above the door as she steps inside Mavi
s’s store. Bolts of brightly coloured cloth — ginghams, plaids, florals — are displayed on low tables and piled on shelves, and, on a rack at the back of the store, Caroline finds buttons on hundreds of cards. Mavis, the widow who owns the store, is busy at the catalogue desk, helping Anna Bilyk select a pattern. Mavis’s husband was killed by a freight train while crossing a track on a country road ten years ago and Mavis, nearly forty and childless, has never remarried or even been courted by anyone again, as far as Caroline knows. She has often wondered what Mavis’s life must be like, happily independent, running her own business with no one to answer to except herself. No one demanding meals on time or shirts pressed just so. Caroline reaches into her purse to find a swatch of fabric from a blouse she is sewing and sets about trying to find buttons to match. She is so busy at her task that she doesn’t notice the bell ring when the door opens again.
“Eldon told me I might find you here!” Elvina marches up to Caroline, her face flushed. She is wearing a royal-blue blouse, stained by half moons of perspiration under her arms, and a navy skirt with box pleats that reminds Caroline of the hideous drapes that once hung in Eldon’s room.
“Where did you see Eldon?” Caroline says, attempting a smile. “I thought he was at the elevator picking up his grain cheques.”
“And so he was. I bumped into him as he was coming out of the bank. He’s not too happy with the boys at the elevator, let me tell you. It seems there was a problem with the way the last loads of wheat were graded. Davis seems to think there was a touch of bran frost, although Eldon is certain there’s not. We didn’t get that early frost last fall that most others did.”
“It was quite widespread, from what I remember,” Mavis says. She is at the cash register, ringing in Anna’s pattern. “I covered my tomatoes, and lucky I did, too, because just next door, Judy Eberhoff’s tomatoes and cucumbers were black by the next afternoon. Didn’t you tell me you’d lost all your tender flowers that night, Caroline?”
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