Cora didn’t say what she intended to sell; there was no need. Beulah looked over her shoulder into the kitchen where the china crate stood. When she turned again to stare at Cora, her brow was furrowed in disbelief.
“You can’t mean to sell the president’s dishes.”
“Indeed, I do mean to sell them, and I shall.”
It was clear the girl was struggling to hold back a laugh. “To who?”
“To whom.” Cora didn’t wait for Beulah to respond; the girl seldom paid any heed to grammatical corrections. “I don’t yet know to whom I will sell the dishes. But I am determined to find a buyer all the same.”
“Whatever for, Ma? Spring is here. Me and Clyde have begun the planting. Sorry; Clyde and I. We’ve made it through the winter; better days are ahead. We don’t need the money.”
“This isn’t about money.” The words were very nearly a shout, high and strained. Cora pressed her lips together, fighting for control. When she trusted herself to speak coolly, she said, “Money has very little to do with my decision; though of course we will require some money if we are to survive in town. We must find a house to rent, and without a farm, we must buy our food, so there is some necessity.”
Beulah straightened abruptly—lurched away from the wall. “Ma, you’re talking of moving to Paintrock, not just visiting.”
Cora tucked her carved box under one arm. “Indeed, I am speaking of moving to town. Why should we not live closer to your father, where we may visit him if the sheriff permits?”
“Because we have everything we need to live right here, on our farm.”
“This isn’t our farm, Beulah. Don’t you see? Without your father, we cannot work our own land. We are obliged to the Webbers for their charity—slaves to them. Or so it seems to me.”
“Come now, Ma. We ain’t exactly living like slaves.”
Something bitter stung the back of Cora’s throat. She laughed. “Aren’t we? Well, perhaps you haven’t felt like a slave these past six months, but I have. It’s no life to lead, and I’ve no inclination to keep Nettie Mae’s house for her any longer. Not now that winter has passed and the way to town is clear.”
“We’ll move back here, to our own house, and wake the farm. Make it grow again.”
“Who—you and me? And which of us will tend the children while we break our backs in the fields?”
“Clyde will help us, just like he did last fall.”
“Don’t you see?” Anguish wrung Cora’s chest. The words came out strangled, as small as she felt herself to be. “I can’t live here any longer. I cannot abide this place. The memories of what I once had . . . the certainty of what I’ve lost, what I ruined. Destroyed with my own hands, my careless, selfish hands. And that, out there.” Cora pointed at the still-open door, the pale-blue light spilling across the threshold.
“The prairie?” Beulah sounded as if she couldn’t be made to understand—as if no mind could wrap itself around the crux of Cora’s despair.
She all but wailed her answer. “The loneliness. The isolation. For mercy’s sake, girl, how can you stand it? It’s nothing, nothing—and it goes on and on forever! I need other people around me. Grown men and women. Women who don’t hate me and wish me dead in my grave. I want society, Beulah. Visitors and friends and church services on Sunday. Not this dead, lifeless plain where nothing lives but what grows between my fences. And not that terrible distance, the emptiness stretching clear out to the horizon. And beyond the horizon, too. God knows for how many miles that desolation continues.”
“Ma,” Beulah said softly, “the prairie isn’t empty. Nor is it desolate.”
“Oh, isn’t it?” Cora’s answering laugh was so short and bitter, she put herself in mind of Nettie Mae. “I don’t see any other farms, but for the Webbers’. I never see chimney smoke rising from the plain at sunset. It is empty, Beulah. As empty as my heart.”
Beulah came to her then, and eased the carved box from Cora’s arms. She set it carefully on the stone hearth and took Cora by her hand.
“Come along, Ma. I want to show you something.”
Cora remained rooted to the spot, though Beulah tugged her toward the door.
“What do you want to show me?”
“What’s out there,” Beulah said. “What’s really out there, out in the world, and all around you.”
Cora thought of the long horizon, its hard, straight edge unrelieved by any sign of human habitation. And the wind that blew without ceasing, the endless motion of the grass—waves—mesmerizing the eye, sickening the stomach. The whole world one color, and that the color of the void. “I already know what’s out there. I don’t need to see it.”
But Beulah pulled her hand again, and Cora’s feet moved as if under a spell. She stepped across the threshold. Prairie swept out from the porch steps. Six months, and it was already seeking to reclaim the Bemis farm. And the farm was already surrendering: pale-green spears of grass thrusting up between the cracks of the steps, low sagebrush buttercup creeping inward from the garden’s edge, overtaking the ground that should have been weeded and planted. Anger flashed in Cora’s breast. She thought, After all the years we’ve spent working this land, shouldn’t it have fought against the wilderness? One autumn, one winter, a few scant weeks of spring, and the prairie was already reclaiming what had once belonged to the Bemis family, everything for which Ernest had so tirelessly worked.
Beulah led her down the steps into the garden—what remained of the garden.
“You say the prairie is empty and lifeless, Ma, but that’s not true.”
A patch of spring beauties had come up where the first row of carrots ought to have begun. Beulah stooped and picked a stem. She held it up for Cora to examine. Two flowers had already opened; the petals were as white as sun-bleached cotton, veined in vibrant pink. Beulah rolled the stem between her fingers; the blossoms and their fleshy leaves rotated slowly. Cora thought of the stars in the night sky, how she had read in a book once that they turned, too, wheeling high above the earth.
When she was young—when her marriage was new and unblemished—on the first night after Ernest had staked his claim on forty untamed acres on the bank of the river, Cora had crept from the wagon box in the dark of night. Ernest never stirred; he slept on in a nest of blankets, with Beulah and little Benjamin, a swaddled infant, safe beside him. Cora had walked as far as she’d dared from the wagon, not more than a few yards. The river glinted between the cottonwoods, for the night had been cloudless, the sky thick with stars. Magnified by moonlight, every detail of the trees had stood in sharp relief against the night. The full moon hung like a lone jewel against black velvet.
Cora had sunk down in the grass. It crepitated around her, under the hem and circumference of her nightdress. Blades and seeds pricked at her skin through the fabric. Believing then—in her youth and naivete—that she could come to love this place, Cora had lain back and looked up into the sky. And she had told herself, I’m far from the city here, as far as I can get. Far from all the things that once distracted me. Now at last, I will be able to see the stars turning. But they hadn’t turned. The stars had remained as fixed and distant as they ever were in Saint Louis. There were more stars to be seen on the prairie—many more. So many, Cora had felt as if the stars had weight and substance, felt she could breathe them in. But if they moved, she never saw.
Now, though, as the stem of flowers turned in her daughter’s fingers, the ground seemed to shift under Cora’s feet. Addled, she swayed and clutched Beulah’s shoulder for balance, and recalled all at once—a memory so vivid, so present she could smell the dry paper and feel the pages whispering under her fingertips—that the book had said it was the earth that turned, not the stars. If the stars seemed to move, it was only an illusion, and the world never ceased spinning.
Cora shut her eyes, swallowing again and again until the wave of nausea dissipated.
“I don’t understand you,” she said to Beulah, her eyes still closed.
&nb
sp; “Of course you understand me. You’re my mother.”
“I don’t understand why you can’t see it—the emptiness. Why you don’t feel it, too. It must be because you never knew the city. You were so young when we left Saint Louis, so small.”
But that wasn’t the reason, and Cora knew it. She remembered Beulah, no taller than her knee, brushing a tuft of grass across her lips.
Beulah answered softly, “I don’t understand why you can’t see what I see, Ma. But I wish you would open your eyes.”
Cora squeezed them shut, more tightly still.
“I wish,” Beulah said, “you could feel it. All the life around you. You miss society—I know you do. You miss the dances and the supper parties and just saying hullo to a stranger as you walk down the street. You miss the streets, the carriages, the buildings and smokestacks, the church bells ringing—”
“How did you know that?” At last, Cora opened her eyes, but only to fix her daughter with a stern look.
Beulah only smiled. “I remember the church bells, too. You might not believe me, for I know I was awful small when we left Saint Louis, but I do remember. The sound was soft and pretty. It made me feel calm.”
“Yes. Calm.” Placid and protected, shielded from despair.
“But, Ma, society is all around you. There ain’t a powerful lot of women or men out here, I admit, but we have our horses and our cows, our chickens. And the wild birds, too—all the wild things. The prairie dogs, the jackrabbits, the deer and antelope. The wolves and coyotes, even if they are a danger now and then.”
Cora folded her arms tightly—like Nettie Mae, she thought—and began striding back toward the Webber house. Beulah stuck to her side like a bedstraw seed.
“There’s more life and more society besides just animals,” the girl insisted. “The plants will speak to you, if you let them. And the river and the hills and the canyon. The mountains, too.”
Cora cast her daughter a withering glance. “It’s lucky for you we aren’t in the city, for I’d send you to the hospital if we were. Such talk—imagine!”
Beulah grinned. “Lucky for sure.”
“It saddens me, Beulah—truly saddens me—that you’ve come to think of grass and canyons and prairie dogs as good company.”
“But they are good company.”
“I’ve failed you as a mother. All the more reason to move to Paintrock. You need the company of people your age—other girls, and nice boys from good families, with whom you might make a match someday.”
“If you move me to Paintrock, I’ll run off. I’ll go back to the prairie.”
She said it with such conviction that Cora stopped dead in the field. The girl spoke the truth. Cora couldn’t prevent her mouth falling open as she stared at Beulah—who went on smiling with such perfect serenity, they might have been discussing what to fix for supper. Cora seldom struck any of her children, but she raised her hand now, poised to slap the girl’s cheek. Beulah stepped back, beyond Cora’s reach. If Cora wished to strike her now, she would have to chase her through the field. She lowered her hand to her side.
“This is a dreadful lonely place for you, Ma, but it ain’t so for me.” The girl’s words were soft, each one deliberate, chosen with patient care. “This is where I belong. You could belong here, too, if you’d only allow yourself to see.”
“There is nothing to see but grass. And that ugly flatness.”
“If you would listen—”
“I’ve listened to you endlessly, Beulah Bemis, but I will listen no more to your foolish prattling.”
“I don’t mean listen to me. Listen to the world speaking. It’s speaking to you, Ma. It wants you to hear.”
“I’ve no intention of listening.” Where had this acerbic streak come from, she wondered. Six long months in Nettie Mae’s company.
“If you did listen, you might be comforted by what you heard. Any rate, there’s some weeks to go before the road will lose its mud. We can’t take a wagon all the way to Paintrock till then. If you listen now, what the prairie tells you might be of some comfort. It might sustain you all those weeks, till you can finally leave. If you decide to leave after all.”
Cora narrowed her eyes. She seemed to feel again the prick of sharp seeds through linen. She hadn’t gone more than a few yards from the wagon that night. Any farther, and she would have lost herself to the prairie.
She said, “If I agree to listen, will you then leave me in peace? I’ve work to do back at Nettie Mae’s house—more packing up and cleaning before we can return here to our home. Time isn’t running any slower.”
“I’ll leave you in peace,” Beulah promised.
“Very well, then.”
Cora heaved a sigh, crossed her arms once more below her breasts, and stared down at the grass around her feet. A soft breeze stirred. Stems and leaves, eagerly green, hissed as they rubbed together. From the distant cottonwoods a flycatcher called, a sound like a baby’s rattle.
“What do you hear?” Beulah asked.
“Wind,” Cora said shortly. “Birds. That’s all, child—no society.” No company, no relief from years of isolation.
Beulah laughed. “You got to listen harder than that.”
“Work,” Cora said. “I’ve no more time to play games.”
Beulah took her hand again. Perhaps it was only because Cora had longed so desperately for company since Ernest had gone, and the girl was growing fast now, almost a woman. Whatever the reason might have been, Beulah’s touch stilled Cora, rooting her to her place. She stared at her daughter, wordless and waiting.
“Close your eyes.”
Against her better judgment, Cora shut her eyes.
“Now,” Beulah whispered, “listen to the world.”
At first there was little that Cora hadn’t heard already. The grass rustled around her hem. The flycatcher went on buzzing in the cottonwoods, indolent and droning. Cora waited, but the sounds never changed. She was on the verge of opening her eyes and scolding Beulah again when a strong gust of wind came down from the foothills. It pressed Cora’s body, rocking her back on her heels, so she clutched Beulah’s hand more tightly. The wind smelled of cool damp heights, of snow still clinging to the shadowy places, of cracks running deep through granite. The grass at Cora’s feet hissed louder, and louder still. And all at once, with Beulah’s fingers laced between her own, Cora heard not one uniform sibilance but the minute and individual striking of each blade of grass against its neighbor. She was aware—suddenly, a precarious lurch of perception—that every stalk and stem of grass was a life, an individual. And they were myriad, numerous, so countless they made the word “countless” a mockery of human understanding. That teeming expanse of living things, reaching greedily out from the foothills to an eternity Cora couldn’t comprehend. Alive, alive. Next she heard the click and clatter of sagebrush rubbing branch against knotted branch, adding its voice to the cacophony. And she thought of the sage branches, arms twisted by wind and weather, the small leaves gray and thin enough to survive the heat of summer. We’ve a story to tell, the sagebrush whispered. Each one of us, bent and buckled, the kinks and crevices of our bodies, the broken places speaking of all that we have seen. There was a new kind of murmuring somewhere near Cora’s feet, a susurration running counter to the song of the prairie grass. Her eyes remained closed, yet somehow she could see the sound; knowledge of that intrusive whisper came to her as an image of the letter S, the letter undulating, tunneling through grass, slipping over sun-warmed earth. A snake, Cora knew. A snake was moving nearby. She would have taken fright if her eyes had been open—if she had seen its movement with her eyes. But the creature was slipping away, unhurried. It meant her no ill. The call of the flycatcher doubled, multiplied; rattling filled Cora’s head. And now she could hear—could feel—five of the birds. Then six, then seven. Their voices were layered one atop another, but in her stillness, she picked them apart, peeled back the sounds like the layers of an onion. Some of the birds sang from the cottonw
oods, yes. But one was perched somewhere near the Webber barn, and one among the sage on the slope at Cora’s back. She picked more birdcalls out of the silence—the chorus that had once seemed to her like silence. Shrike. Vireo. The low, nasal scolding of a jay, far off and echoing, so Cora knew it must be high in the foothills, calling among the cracked red boulders. Birds she couldn’t identify: a high, repetitive chitter and a mellow, liquid coo. She heard the sheep bleating and the buzz of the flies that beset them, heard the knife-edged slice of horses’ tails whisking through air. It cannot be, she told herself. I’m acres from the paddock, acres from the farm. She heard the boys laughing and playing in the shade of the Webber house. And Nettie Mae speaking—not her words, but the tone of her voice, its harsh, demanding note.
A heavy throb kicked at her chest, deep inside, for something was missing from the chorus—a critical note. Ernest should have been singing with the others; the land strained to hear his voice, but he was silent, muted by distance, cut off by Cora’s blundering.
This is my husband’s place as much as my daughter’s, Cora realized. He belonged there, like the birds and the sage and the snake slipping easily through the coolness of shadow. If I leave the farm—even if I only go as far as Paintrock—I will lose Ernest for good, in the end.
Cora opened her eyes and pulled her hand out of Beulah’s grip.
The girl gazed at her expectantly, pale brows lifted.
“I heard nothing,” Cora said. “Nothing but wind and birds.”
Beulah’s answering smile was slow and knowing. Cora clenched her fist, for she ached again to slap the girl. Beulah could sense the lie in her voice; Cora knew it. That lazy smile, distressing in its self-assurance, said everything the girl would not say.
Is this how she lives her life? Always so dreadfully aware?
Cora could no longer meet her daughter’s eye. She turned away, pressing a hand to her forehead as if she expected to find herself burning with fever. The grass still sang around her, clamoring from all sides. She could hear the jay, far off and faint though it was.
One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow: A Novel Page 37