Midnight at the Electric

by Jodi Lynn Anderson

  He says how I never showed the slightest sign of feeling that way for him. “Everything you want is always written all over you,” he said, his head was on my shoulder. “I looked for it so many times, but it wasn’t there. I didn’t know you could keep secrets like that, Cathy.”

  I’ve never been accused of being stoic.

  “I honestly didn’t think the thought of me like that had ever crossed your mind,” he went on.

  “It has crossed my mind,” I said, kissing one corner of his lips, then the other.

  Since then, several times yesterday and today, we’ve found ourselves moving toward the same shadowy places to hide from the heat and from Mama.

  Mama sleeps in a chair every night, down in the parlor. Since Sheepie, worry keeps her staring out the windows, until she nods off, exhausted. But some night soon, she’ll make it back to her bed. And that’s when I’ll take my chance to make the long walk into town with my money in my pocket.

  JULY 6, 1934

  Yesterday we did our chores and circled around each other, and when he went into the bunkhouse at lunch, biting my nails, I followed him. He was waiting around the doorway for me.

  He took a wet cloth and rubbed the dust off my lips. He put Vaseline under my nose where it was raw.

  I told him I love him over and over, whispering it in his ear, and each time he held me tighter, and each time the words felt better on my lips.

  I reached into my pocket and gave him a perfect, round white pebble I’d found earlier in the day. (Gifts are hard to come by in Canaan.) He reached under his bed, where he brushed some dirt aside and lifted two of the roughhewn planks from the floor.

  “I made a hiding place,” he explained. He pulled out a small wooden box and opened it, laying the pebble inside. I could see the box contained two quarters and a broken pocket watch, the only thing he’d arrived in Canaan with.

  “This is where I keep my treasures,” he joked. “Including my vast savings. Or what’s left of them. And now all my favorite pebbles.”

  “Who are you hiding it from?” I asked, amused.

  Ellis stared into the box. “Old habit, I guess, from before I came here. I just like to know it’s all tucked away where only I can find it,” he said. “It makes me feel safe.”

  I felt guilty, seeing the mostly empty box. He didn’t have much to save.

  I keep my plans from Ellis. Every time we’re together, I unravel myself for him, show him almost everything about me. But the Electric, I keep to myself. I can’t stand the thought, now, of how he would look at me if he knew.

  JULY 7, 1934

  Last night, Mama slept in her room. I watched her go to bed, and my heart began to pound.

  Around eleven I tiptoed into Beezie’s room and got her out of bed, dressed her, and bundled her down the stairs in my arms. Thankfully she was too groggy to ask questions. I snuck past the bunkhouse with her on my back.

  The Ragbag Fair was, if possible, more crowded than last time. A wooden trailer I’d never noticed stood to our left as we entered, painted with promises of what lay inside: a mermaid, a wolf man, a woman with the world’s longest fingernails. Crowds were making their way up the stairs. The piglet races were on; we could hear the announcer above the crowd, and the carousel spun brightly as we walked past it.

  “Why are we here, Cathy?” Beezie whispered into my ear, her arms tight around my neck.

  “We’re here because we need to be,” I said nervously.

  All through Professor Spero’s talk, the mood was different than that first night. The buzz of excitement was gone. The mood was heavier, people more urgent and more desperate. When the time came, I took Beezie’s hand and we went to stand in line.

  Inside, the tent fell short of my expectations. An assistant stood just inside, taking the “donations.” The main attraction was just a table at the center of the room and the electric ball at the center of the table. Professor Spero sat behind it, speaking to people as they sat down, then taking their hands gently in his and laying their fingers on the ball for the amount of time they’d paid for. When it was our turn, I guided Beezie into the chair. The professor smiled wearily. I had a hollow, nervous feeling as he reached for Beezie’s hands.

  Despite the fact that I don’t pray anymore, I prayed.

  And I watched Beezie take my chance at living forever.

  “Do you feel better?” I asked a few minutes later, when we’d emerged into the open air.

  To my relief, Beezie nodded, her chubby cheeks pink with excitement (her cheeks are never pink anymore, so I take it as a good sign). “I think so,” she said breathlessly. “I feel a lot better. Almost completely better.”

  I only happened to look up when she did, following her eyes to see Ellis standing under the big clock, watching us.

  We were halfway home. Ellis hadn’t said a word, and I was too prideful to ask him, until the words burst out of me.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He gave me a look like the answer was obvious, which it was, and tightened one hand around Beezie’s ankle, the other around her wrists that crisscrossed in front of his neck.

  “I can’t read your eyebrows,” I said.

  He stopped walking for a minute, opened his mouth a few times to say something, then started walking again. “You can’t expect me to be happy about spending my money on something so . . .” His eyes darted to mine, then away. Like saying it took a lot of effort.

  “So what?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I’ll pay you back.”

  This brought him to a full stop.

  “First, you can’t, and second, I don’t want the money, Cathy. I’d give you more than that if I could, everything I have. It’s the waste. I saved that money for a year! How could you throw it away on something so . . . flimsy? Something for idiots?”

  I felt the ice in my feet again. I felt right and wrong all at the same time.

  “Beezie says it worked,” I said. “It’s going to help her lungs.”

  “That’s the most nonsensical thing I ever heard.”

  “It’s scientific.” I felt my cheeks heating with humiliation.

  “It’s pretend.”

  “You don’t know anything about anything, Ellis. You’ve never even read a whole book.”

  He stopped for a moment, and his face hardened. “Well I do have common sense.”

  I swallowed whatever arguments I had ready. I couldn’t defend myself. What other argument could I make for the promise of the Electric to be real except that I needed it to be?

  “And to put Beezie through it,” he went on. “That’s the worst part. To give her false hope.”

  “It wasn’t for her initially,” I shot back.

  He bit his bottom lip thoughtfully, his eyes sad, and shook his head.

  We walked the rest of the way in silence, Beezie still sound asleep, and then slowed in front of Ellis’s door, lingering in the dark and looking at each other.

  Ellis let go of Beezie’s foot and suddenly slid his hand into mine. Like we’d done it a hundred times. “Cathy . . . ,” he whispered. But I quickly pulled my fingers away. I reached for Beezie, to gently pull her off his back, and held her snug in my arms. She lay her head limply on my shoulder.

  “What if it actually helps?” I asked. “What if it turns out to be true? Then I have to try. Ellis, I don’t know what else to do.”

  It was my way of making peace. I wasn’t going to apologize for anything I’d said. The anger had gone out of Ellis. He was only looking at the ground, miserable.

  “Now you know my secret,” I said softly. I wanted to move on, erase the anger between us. “It’s only fair if you tell me yours. Remember?”

  Ellis shook his head, laughed ruefully under his breath, looking embarrassed.

  “What is it?” I asked, suddenly not sure I wanted to know.

  He looked away as he explained. “Lyla was the one who wanted me to save that money. Isn’t that something? She wanted me to buy her a ri
ng.”

  The words felt like ice, pouring down my throat.

  “Well maybe she’ll marry you without it,” I said flatly. “Why don’t you ask her?”

  He reached for my hand again. “Are you crazy, Cathy? She knows how I feel about you. You walked in on us, remember? She guessed that day. It’s over with her.”

  I picked a peeling piece of wood from the bunkhouse wall, breathless.

  “But you like her.”

  “She’s fine. She’s great. Lyla’s really great.” He blew out a frustrated breath, looking around in annoyance. “But I love you, Cathy. There’s not room for two.”

  I couldn’t look at him. There were too many feelings all at once.

  “Will you please look at me?” he said.

  I didn’t want to, but I met his eyes.

  “Would you leave here with me?” I asked. “If you’re right about the Electric . . . if Beezie doesn’t get better . . .”

  Despite what he’s been saying as long as I’ve known him, about loving where he’s landed, I expected at that moment for him to say yes. I could see how much he wanted to close the distance between us, knock it out of the way, touch me again. But his hesitation made me nervous. He looked scared, and worried.

  “The dust is terrible,” he said after a long spell. “I know that. But . . . the rest of the world can be terrible too. There aren’t any jobs. People hate us for being poor and being from here and for taking what little jobs there are for almost no money. And on top of that we wouldn’t have a house, maybe not a bed, maybe not even a roof. Beezie wouldn’t be better off in San Francisco or New York. Not one bit. Here, people look out for each other.”

  I opened my mouth to contradict him, to say we could figure it out, but he went on.

  “And then, I’m thinking about myself too. I don’t want to spend my life surrounded by strangers. I don’t think I can go back to being homeless again, or anonymous, I can’t stand the thought of giving up this place. I only really started living when I came here. I don’t think I could handle that uncertainty again.”

  “You sound like Mama.”

  “Well, I agree with her.” He seemed to be considering his next words, like he was unsure whether he should say them or not. “And, Cathy, for all your talk, I don’t think, deep down, you could go either. I think leaving here would hurt you more than you know.”

  All of my impassioned protests died in my throat. “I only want what’s right for Beezie,” I finally said. I listened to him breathing, sinking inside.

  “I do too,” he said.

  It’s keeping me from sleep tonight, wondering if he’s right about me and I’ve never had the courage I thought I did. I always thought that if I didn’t have so much holding me back, I could roam the world.

  With any luck, the miraculous power of the Electric is flooding Beezie as I write this, and I won’t have to choose.

  JULY 11, 1934

  Happiness and restlessness and fear . . . that’s all these days are, one always right behind the next. I’m desperate, always desperate, to be in Ellis’s room, to have some part of me touching some part of him, even if it’s a finger against his wrist, even if it’s my heel on the top of his ankle. It’s a thread of life running through this dead place. Last night I couldn’t sleep for knowing he was so close by, for worrying about Beezie, for the heat.

  We received a letter from the Chiltons when we went into town today, before a duster blew up that kept us indoors all this evening. They are in San Francisco, homeless and living in a camp.

  In San Francisco, they wrote, we disappear.

  And then they shared with us the terrible news. Even weeks after leaving and breathing the clean air, their youngest child, Lizzie, has died from dust pneumonia.

  JULY 17, 1934

  Things are strange, it’s like the feeling we get before a storm rolls up. There’s so much silence in the house. Ellis brings in our groceries, he helps me carry the washtub back and forth to the well, he reaches for my hand and I reach for his and that’s all for now.

  Tuesday was a bad day for Beezie, who had a terrible attack. One minute everything was fine and the house was silent and the next she was calling in panic for Mama from her room saying that she couldn’t breathe. The doctor came and again urged us to consider leaving.

  Mama paces and looks out the windows and barely does any work. What is there to do anymore? No crops to harvest, our clothes are getting too thin and worn out to wash. There’s always dust to sweep, but it will always be there.

  JULY 24, 1934

  It’s been a week since I last wrote. Beezie knows we are in on a secret, and she keeps giving me meaningful, wide-eyed glances, and whispering, “When do I get better?” Mama sees her mincing around and assumes it’s just her being her usual, dramatic self.

  Her coughing gets worse every day instead of better. And I’m beginning to think that while it’s true we are in on a secret, it’s not the one that Beezie thinks. The secret is that I don’t think the Electric has worked at all, and I don’t know if I ever truly thought it would.

  JULY 29, 1934

  Yesterday morning was so breezy and bright and lovely, we could never have guessed what was coming. Mama and I were out enjoying the weather, our faces up to the sun, and Ellis was pumping water as best he could while a baseball game echoed from his wireless. Beezie was halfway between him and us, drawing in the dirt with sticks.

  Mama had just said to me, “You know, the weather is so fine. Maybe I’ll go for a walk.” She crossed the grass to Galapagos and gave her a nice long scratch on the neck and then walked off down the drive. I watched her, worried. It wasn’t like her to stroll as if she didn’t have a care in the world.

  I kept thinking, Get up and sweep, and was trying to will myself into it when a small flock of blackbirds crossed the sky. I was thinking it was unusual to see so many, when a bigger, thicker flock came squawking across the horizon. I’d just looked across the yard at Ellis, and he at me, when his radio blared out, crackled, and died.

  Something wobbled inside me.

  Now the sky was full of birds, flying in our direction, veering a little to the left, a little to the right in waves.

  When I saw the storm itself, moving in behind them, I didn’t recognize it. I thought illogically that it was a mountain range—that maybe it had gotten clear enough to see all the way to Colorado.

  But it was growing and moving. A sickness clutched at my stomach. It wasn’t a storm but a wall coming toward us.

  I could see Mama’s figure for a moment between the trees, very small, and I yelled for her, but she didn’t hear me. She was facing away from the incoming disaster, unaware.

  The wind was already pulling at my skirt by then. Suddenly Ellis and I were both moving, running toward Beezie. I grabbed her by the armpits just as we reached each other and turned for the bunkhouse. The wind had picked up so strongly it knocked me over, and I shoved Beezie toward Ellis. He clutched her as I made my way behind him.

  We burst through the door just as the light went dim, the dust blocking the sun so thickly I couldn’t see two feet in front of me.

  We huddled into a corner. I held the bottom of my skirt over Beezie’s nose and mouth and told her it was going to be okay. Ellis had his arms around both of us, as if he could shield us from the gritty air. My eyes and throat burned.

  Around us the roof and walls moaned. I just knew that any minute they could collapse and crush us to death, or that we’d suffocate on the dust blowing through the seams in the walls.

  “The world is ending!” Beezie shrieked, and it felt like a terrible thing, that nature could allow someone so small and helpless to feel so much fear. A helpless rage at God rose up with my panic.

  The minutes passed, and the storm only blew harder.

  When the light returned, a few minutes later, it came fast and sudden. The wind fell, and it was like someone had pulled a shade off the sun. We stood slowly.

  I walked to the door and peered outs
ide, then opened it a crack when Ellis came up behind me, touching my arm. I gasped.

  We stepped out into a new world. It may as well have been the surface of the moon. The fences were gone, buried. Mama’s truck was gone, buried. The house still stood, but the porch was buried too.

  We shielded our eyes from the sun and looked down the drive, dumbfounded.

  Dirt up to its waist, a figure was stumbling toward us.

  Mama was making her way home.

  JULY 30, THREE IN THE MORNING

  I haven’t slept. The static is so heavy in the air I can see it weaving along the fence outside, an eerie, crackling blue light. It feels like the earth has shifted under my feet, even more than it did in the storm.

  Late last night, as I was writing my last entry, Mama knocked on my door, standing with a bundle of something in her arms, all wrapped in fabric. She held it so gently and carefully that at first I thought she was carrying a porcelain doll.

  She walked in and sat on my bed and motioned for me to sit beside her. She looked pained as she tried to speak.

  She took a deep breath, kneaded the bundle in her arms nervously.

  “Yesterday . . . I thought I might not make it back home.” She swallowed hard. “For the first time, I thought I’d never see you and Beezie again. And of all the terrible things I was feeling, I regretted most that you would never see these.”

  She unwrapped the bundle and laid it down on the bed between us—it was a pile of letters, wrinkled and worn and all in their envelopes.

  “These will tell you some things about me,” she said. “And about you.”

  She handed them to me, and I laid my hand on them in wonder and surprise and fear, because of Mama’s expression. I sorted through them gently, all addressed from Lenore Allstock, Forest Row, England.

  Mama cleared her throat and couldn’t meet my eyes. “You can ask me about them, if you want. After you’re finished. It’s a gift I should have given you long ago,” she said, pulling her hand away stiffly. “But it’s a painful gift. And I’m”—she sucked in a breath—“I’m so sorry for that.”

  And now here I am, hours later. I’ve unwrapped Mama’s painful gift.

  Just after I finished, I trudged through the thick drifts of dust in the yard to Ellis’s bunkhouse. I climbed into his bed and pulled the covers around both of us. I kissed him awake. Groggy, he tried to hold me at length to look at me, but I was insistent, kissing him until he softened his grip and gave in. His hands trembled on my arms.