Tallgrass

by Sandra Dallas

  Mom glanced over her shoulder into the dining room, where Dad and Bud were talking. Granny had taken out her needlework and was lost in piecing a quilt block of an airplane. “If it was up to me, I wouldn’t do it. But if it was up to me, we wouldn’t be in any war, either.” She paused, then picked up a plate and began drying it. “Still, there’s the beets to think about. We’ve got to get them planted in a few months. There’s nothing more important than that. This is not a matter of my choosing.” She paused. “What do you think about it, Rennie?”

  I’d never been asked my opinion so much in my life. “Like Granny says, they’d be better than Beaner. But aren’t you worried about the Jolly Stitchers?”

  “Not one bit,” Mom said quickly. Then she added, “I’ve never been one to care what other people think.”

  “Huh?” I said.

  After I went upstairs to bed, I reread all of Marthalice’s letters. It didn’t take long, because there were only six of them, and they were short. And Marthalice wrote with a big hand. Then I opened an old tin Whitman’s Sampler box that Granny had given me and took out a pencil and sharpened it. I removed some sheets of Santa Fe Railroad stationery that Mom had picked up on the train home from Denver. I wrote Marthalice a long letter, telling her all about Buddy’s surprise visit, because I wanted her to be part of it. And I asked when she was coming home. When Marthalice answered my letter, she said she’d give anything to see Bud in his uniform. But she never said a word about coming back to Ellis.

  THE SNOW, WHICH H AD started before Christmas, continued all night, a hard, stinging snow brought by a wind that swept a thousand miles across the prairie. The wind pounded on the north side of the house, rattling the window sashes, and I felt it, although I slept in a wooden bed with a high headboard and footboard. Snow drifted in through cracks, dusting the covers over me like flour from a sifter. I had so many quilts piled on top of me that I could hardly turn over, and I ached from being curled up into a tight ball, my feet tucked inside my flannel nightgown to keep them warm against the cold, stiff sheets. My bedroom was above the kitchen, and there was a grate in the floor to let the heat rise, but the room still was freezing. I didn’t mind, however. I liked lying there in the cold, exploring the sheets with my toes and listening to the murmur of voices below me. I felt as if I were inside a cocoon.

  When I finally got out of bed, I grabbed my clothes and hurried downstairs to dress by the oil heater in the dining room. I loved icy winter mornings, when there didn’t seem to be anything in the world but our farm. Although I knew the place would go to Bud one day, I still couldn’t imagine ever living anywhere else. I wanted to attend college, and thought maybe I’d get a job and a sweet little apartment in Denver like Marthalice’s, but in my heart, I hoped I’d marry a beet farmer one day and live on a farm like ours.

  The snow had stopped, and the sun shone lukewarm through the gray sky, which promised another storm. Huge drifts, polished to a shine by the wind, were pushed against the fences. Mom had fixed breakfast for Dad and Bud, and they’d gone to check the livestock. She was in the henhouse with the chickens.

  “There’s flannel cakes,” Granny said, stirring the makings left in Mom’s green batter bowl. Granny turned on the flame under the frying pan and spooned in bacon drippings from the grease can. After the drippings sizzled, Granny poured batter into the pan and made a test cake, and when it was done, she threw it into the garbage pail for the chickens. Then she poured batter into the pan, and we watched until bubbles formed and created holes; then she flipped the pancakes over and let them cook for a few seconds on the other side. When they were done, she set them on a plate that had been warmed in the oven. Granny had kept the bacon warm, too, and the syrup was hot in a pan on a back burner. We did things nicer than most folks. When I spent the night at Betty Joyce’s house, we ate cold fried eggs and side meat that had congealed in its grease, because Betty Joyce’s dad said his wife wasn’t making two breakfasts. If we wanted hot food, he told us, we could get up at dawn with him.

  While I ate, Granny took up her piecing, using tiny stitches to attach the tail onto the body of the airplane on her quilt square, and I thought how much things had changed since she was a girl. She and her sister had come across the prairie in covered wagons. Now Granny could look up into the sky and see airplanes, or at least she could if one ever flew over Ellis, which in my memory it never had. I wondered if things would change as much during my lifetime. They’d gotten a good start.

  Dad and Bud came up onto the porch, stamping the snow off their feet and taking off their galoshes before stomping into the kitchen. Dad’s face was red, and he took off his plaid wool hat with the earflaps and rubbed his ears to warm them. “It’s colder out there than an old maid in December,” he said, going to the stove and turning on the fire under the coffeepot. “Remember there was a man up north got caught in a storm and froze his hands and feet? He wasn’t much good after that.”

  “Well, what’s your excuse? You never got froze,” Granny said, and Dad squeezed her shoulder, happy that her mind was with us that morning. I was, too. It was such a fine morning that Granny deserved to enjoy it.

  She reached into the dish drainer for green glass coffee mugs for Dad and Bud and took her china cup and saucer out of the cupboard. When Granny leaned over to set down the cups, I smelled cinnamon along with talcum powder, and I knew she’d already mixed up the yeast batter for cinnamon rolls for dinner. There wasn’t sugar for icing, but they’d be just as good plain.

  While I finished my breakfast, the three of them sat at the table with me, drinking their coffee, chatting about the storm and how glad they were for the moisture. They talked about the little things that needed doing, the way farm folks always did at the start of a day. I loved the comfort of that talk. Bud said he’d climb up on top of the barn and fix the lightning rod that had come loose in the wind. Granny mentioned she’d sure like a new cream separator, and Dad reminded her gently that he’d bought one just that fall. Mom came in, and they asked how the chickens had weathered the storm. The talk warmed me as much as the pancakes, and I thought there wouldn’t be anything nicer than having that conversation around my own kitchen table one day. I hoped my farm wouldn’t be too far away from Bud’s, and that perhaps Mom and Dad would live with me, and we’d remember when Buddy went off to war and how worried we were, and then he’d come home without a scratch. “Why, we worried for nothing,” I’d say, and Mom would agree. Then I thought I was getting kind of sappy.

  Mom turned on the fire under the teakettle and spooned fresh grounds into the basket of the coffeepot, and after the water boiled, she poured it into the pot and let the coffee drip. She was taking her cup from the drainer when we heard someone on the porch stamping snow off his feet. Dad leaned back, balancing his chair on two legs, and looked through the window in the door to see who it was. The light shone through the jewel-like panes of colored glass that framed the window, casting a rainbow of colors onto the floor.

  “Come on in, Mr. Watrous. Door’s open,” Dad called before the sheriff could knock.

  Sheriff Watrous opened the door and stood there a moment, kicking one overshoe against the other, but he didn’t get rid of all the snow, because after he came in and stood beside the door, a puddle of water formed on the linoleum, which was faded where Mom and Granny had scrubbed it over the years. “Cold as a witch’s behind out there, Mr. Stroud,” he said. “Ladies.” He touched his Stetson to Mom and Granny but didn’t take it off.

  “Here’s some hot coffee. I must have known you were coming.” Mom handed him a cup. “How you doing, Mr. Watrous?”

  “I’m doing pretty good,” he replied, sipping. You could tell the coffee was scalding hot by the way he drew in his breath after a taste.

  Dad asked Sheriff Watrous if he wanted a saucer to drink his coffee from, which surprised me, because Mom said drinking coffee out of a saucer was trashy. But she also said polite people made their guests feel at home.

  Mr. Watrous de
clined and took small sips of the coffee, and in a minute, he had drunk most of it.

  “What brings you out on a day like this? I thought you’d be sitting at the jail with your feet up on the oil stove,” Dad said. Dad sounded casual, but I knew from the look on his face that he was anxious. The sheriff never stopped by to visit the way other folks did. I thought maybe some other Japanese boys had been beaten up. “Best sit down, Mr. Watrous,” Dad said.

  “This might not be something for Miss Evelina and the girl.” Mr. Watrous cocked his head at Granny and me.

  “There’s nothing Granny hasn’t heard, and Rennie knows considerable about the world these days.”

  I sat up a little straighter, trying to act worldlier, although I’d just been thinking how nice it was that my whole world that morning was the white winter farm. I was pleased, however, that Dad didn’t tell me to go into the other room, that he felt I was old enough to know what was going on outside our place.

  The sheriff took a deep breath and laid his hat on the Hoosier cupboard. “Well, it’s like this, then.” He eyed Granny and me, but he didn’t say any more about us. “You know the little Reddick girl that lives on the other side of Tallgrass? Susan, her name is.”

  Dad barely nodded. I glanced at Mom, who put her hand on my shoulder but didn’t look at me. I knew she was thinking about our visit to Helen Archuleta, Susan’s sister, not long before Christmas. I hadn’t heard anything about the baby being born and wondered if something bad had happened to Helen. I wondered if the sheriff had gotten the names mixed up and he meant Helen instead of Susan.

  The sheriff glanced at Mom out or the corner of his eye, but he spoke to Dad. “They found little Susan out in the field this morning, tore up pretty bad and frozen in a haystack.”

  “Lost in the storm?” Dad asked. He leaned forward and put his hands flat on the oilcloth of the table, waiting for the answer. I thought about Susan losing her crutches in the wind and crawling around on the cold ground, trying to make her way back to the house. She would have reached the haystack and known she’d gone in the wrong direction and crawled into the hay to keep warm. Susan wasn’t brave, and I shivered, knowing how terrified she must have been. Shoot, I’d have been terrified, and I could walk just fine.

  “No, sir. I wished that was the cause of it.” He paused and chewed his bottom lip. “The little girl was murdered. And along with it, I’m sorry to say, the poor little thing had got ravished.”

  4

  “OH,” MOM SAID, GLANCING at Granny, and then at me as she sat down hard in her chair. Granny was sewing placidly, not paying attention to the sheriff. His words had made no impression on her. But they had on me. I stared at him, barely breathing, and I prayed Mom wouldn’t find some chore for me to do upstairs. I needed to stay. Susan was my friend. I had to know what had happened to her. Mom made a halfhearted waving motion at me to tell me to be still, but I hadn’t been about to say anything. I wasn’t absolutely sure what the word ravished meant, but I had a pretty good idea. I pulled my elbows into my sides and stared at the table.

  Susan was a warm, sweet girl, like a bunny. How could anybody hurt her? I wondered. Just a few days before, I’d gone to her house, and we’d worked a thousand-piece puzzle she’d gotten for Christmas. The picture on it was of Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde, and Susan said it made her want to visit a cliff dwelling. She asked if Cliff Palace had an elevator, and we laughed. It was nice that Susan wasn’t self-conscious about her crutches. She had invited me back the next day, but I didn’t like puzzles much. Then Buddy came home, and I forgot about Susan. Maybe she stayed up late last night working on the puzzle, I thought, and somebody saw her through the window. If I’d finished the puzzle with her, she’d have been in bed, safe. I’m sorry, Susan, I said to myself. Although I was in the safest place I knew, the kitchen of our farm, with Buddy and Dad to protect me, I was scared. I’d never been so scared in our house before.

  “That poor thing,” Mom added. “I’ll bake a cake.” Like all farm women, Mom’s reaction to bad news was to take food to the bereaved. It helped them, and it gave her a chore that made her feel useful. I wished I had something to do.

  “She was an awful nice little girl. What happened to her, Hen?” Dad asked. Dad looked almost ready to cry—at least I thought he did. I’d never seen him cry. He glanced at me, and I knew what he was thinking, because I was thinking it, too: What if that had happened to me?

  “I guess I’ll set down.” Sheriff Watrous unbuttoned his coat but didn’t take it off. He dropped into a chair while Dad got up and poured himself coffee, then put the pot on the table. The sheriff waited until Dad took his seat before he spoke. “It looks like the little girl woke up in the night and went outside to use the backhouse. She got the polio a few years back, you know, and was crippled up and couldn’t manage the stairs, so her folks had her to sleep in a room near the kitchen door. This morning, when Elmo Reddick got up, he found the door wide open and the snow blown in. The storm was over by then. At first, he thought his girl was outside, but then he saw the snow was piled up on the floor, and there wasn’t no footprints in it. So he figured she’d gone outside in the evening and hadn’t latched the door good when she came back in. You know how the wind was blowing last night, hard enough to take a door right off the hinges.” He shook his head for emphasis. “Course, it wasn’t like that storm two years ago, or was it three?”

  Mom cleared her throat, prodding the sheriff to forget about the storm and get on with what had happened to Susan. She poured herself more coffee, although she just held the cup and didn’t drink. “Go on, Sheriff Watrous,” she said. I stared at him without blinking, hoping he’d get the hint to move along.

  “When Elmo looked in the bedroom, the girl wasn’t there. So the two of them, Elmo and Opal, went outside looking for her. They were afraid she’d gone out and got lost in the storm. You know how these prairie blizzards can be awful bad.”

  We all nodded. Plains storms were deadly. With the snow swirling around, you could lose your sense of direction and freeze ten feet from your back door. Men put up ropes between their houses and the barns in the winter so they wouldn’t get lost. “And they found her?” Mom asked, agitated that Sheriff Watrous was back on the weather.

  “Opal found her back of the barn, covered with hay. She thought Susan’d crawled in there to keep warm. She was about to wake up the little girl, but then she saw the blood. Even then, Opal said, she didn’t believe her girl was dead, because she looked so peaceful.” The sheriff leaned back on two legs of his chair, thought better of it, and eased the chair back down. “Then Elmo went to pick her up, and they saw little Susan’s throat had been cut, like it’d been sliced with a sickle, and her legs was . . .” The sheriff looked at Mom and said, “Well, she was disarranged. And she didn’t have on her nightdress. She was froze to the hay with her blood. Naked she was.” He pronounced the word necked.

  I looked at the table, embarrassed for Susan. What if I’d been murdered and Mom and Dad had found me naked, and the sheriff had come and looked at me? My insides got all balled up as I thought of Susan outside in the storm without any clothes, her arms and legs and back icy with the cold, how she couldn’t have gotten away from the man because she couldn’t run with her crippled legs. My own hands grew cold as I wondered who had taken her out there and what he’d done to her. I started to cry. Buddy put his arm around me and squeezed my shoulder. Without looking at me, Dad reached over and put his hand on top of mine.

  The sheriff watched me a minute, maybe hoping I’d get up from the table. When I didn’t, he continued. “Elmo stayed with her, and Opal came for me in that big old truck of theirs—don’t know how she made it over the roads, but she did—and me and the coroner was the ones had to tell them for sure that their little girl’d been“—he looked at Granny, who was still sewing—“been taken liberties with, you might say.”

  “Been raped,” Dad said, looking over the sheriff’s head.

  “Yes, sir.” Beads of swea
t stood out on the sheriff’s face, although it was not hot in the room. “It brings a lump to a fellow’s throat.”

  “Any idea who did it, sir?” Bud asked. Everyone looked at the sheriff then, including Granny.

  The sheriff shook his head. He picked up his cup, which was empty, and reached for the pot, but it was empty, too. Mom got up to make fresh coffee, turning on the water in the sink to fill the teakettle and rattling things around more than was necessary. “I wish I had cookies left, Sheriff Watrous, but Bud’s eaten every last one of them. You know how these boys are. They don’t feed them so good in the army,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you. I can’t say as I’d care for food just now.”

  “Oh, those were real good cookies. We gathered the black walnuts ourselves last fall. October, I believe it was. Granny and I.”

  Dad said, “Hush, Mary,” and she was quiet.

  “You ask who done it, and I tell you I’ve got no idea a’tall,” the sheriff told Bud.

  “They have a hired man,” Dad said.

  “It wasn’t him, ’cause he was in town all night. One of the girls upstairs over Jay Dee’s Tavern vouched for that. We asked her right after we took the body to town. No, sir, somebody else was in that yard, and the poor little girl must have bumped into him when she went out to do her duty.”

  “How come she went outside instead of using the chamber pot?” I asked.

  Sheriff Watrous jerked up his head, then looked at me so fiercely that I stared at the oilcloth again and began tracing a flower with my fingertip. “That’s a good question, young lady. You know, I wasn’t thinking right. A man, now he’d get up, but a little girl like that would use the thunder mug under the bed, especially in a storm. Her father said he believed she’d gone to the backhouse, and I never stopped to ponder it.” His head went up and down few times. “You know what that means, don’t you, Mr. Stroud?”