First she’d lost her husband, then she’d lost his family farm. Now she was living with her parents again, and they were about to lose everything, too. And they weren’t unique. Every family all around them had the same story, or near enough like it. This world was nothing but loss, black and wide and deep.
Rich men had played gamblers’ games with the stock market and sent the whole country reeling. It seemed to Ada like the people hurt the worst had hardly even heard of the stock market, much less invested in it, but they were the ones starving nonetheless.
Now she wouldn’t be able to drive into Callwood with what little harvest they could reap. Getting to town would be a dawn-to-dusk endeavor, what with harnessing Henrietta and loading the cart, and then undoing it all when she got home. Her father wouldn’t be able to do it; his back had been bad since last fall, when he wrenched it pulling stumps. He couldn’t possibly sit a cart seat for the long ride to Callwood. Even the truck pained him. Ada would have to drive the team herself.
Accepting that truth, she sighed and answered Chancey’s question. “Yes, Henrietta can pull the cart. I’d appreciate it, Chancey. That would be a big help. Truly.”
Chancey flushed a shy grin and showed his gappy set of teeth. “Happy to help, ma’am. I’ll jus’ get started now, if it’s the same to you.”
She smiled. “Of course. Thank you. Don’t work too late, though. I’ll call you in for supper, if you’d like to stay.” They could at least offer a neighbor a seat at their table. That was something.
“I’d take that kindly, thank you.”
That evening, after Chancey had walked off toward home, promising to return in the morning to work on the cart some more, Ada cleared up the supper dishes and covered up the pot with the potato water. In the morning, she’d use it to mix up some bread dough. From the sitting room, where her parents sat, she heard the scratchy sound of the radio. The best reception came from Knoxville. Pausing at the table with the ceramic salt and pepper shakers in one hand and a wet rag in the other, Ada perked up her ears and tried to tell what show she was hearing. Ah, The Green Hornet. Her parents would listen to anything on the radio, but Daddy had been captivated by that new show.
She and George had saved up for months to buy that radio for her parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary, two years back. By then her mother’s eyesight had gone totally dark, and with them living higher up the mountain, Ada hadn’t been able to keep reading to her every day like she’d done since her eyes began to fail. She’d seen the radio in a Callwood shop and put it on layaway without even talking to George first. Struggling under the weight of the mortgage his father had put on the farm, he didn’t like credit or anything that even smelled of credit, but she’d known he’d understand. He’d always understood.
Now George was gone and she was back home and reading to her mother every night again, but that radio was still their most treasured possession.
She wiped up the table and spread out a fresh square of cheesecloth. Satisfied that the kitchen was tidy, she untied her apron, hung it on its hook, and went to join her parents in the sitting room.
The lights were off. Her mother didn’t need them, and her father liked to listen in the dark, without distraction. Ada felt her way to the far side of the room and slipped her shoes off. She settled on the floor, framed by her parents’ feet, and listened to the story. Her father’s hand drifted down to settle on her shoulder, and she tipped her head to rest on it.
Times were hard. Life was loss. Ada hadn’t known a day without strife and sorrow since George had come in early from the field with a face clammy and waxy pale but for bright red blooms of heat on his cheeks. Twenty-three months ago. She doubted she’d ever have another happy day in her life.
But sometimes, for just moments, everything felt a little bit fine.
Ada scooted the straight-back chair close to the bed and sat down on the frayed straw seat. They were alone in the bedroom; her father always left this moment to mother and daughter, and came to bed afterward. Ada knew he often stood in the hallway and listened as she read, but he didn’t want to intrude on what he called ‘his girls’ time.’
“What story would you like next, Momma?”
She’d finished Paradise Lost the night before. Her mother was a fan of the classics. Though she had hardly any formal education at all herself, she was a smart woman and had been an avid reader and keenly interested in the world. She’d never been prouder than when Ada had gotten her post as a schoolteacher. In fact, Ada was fairly sure—though her mother had never said so—that she’d been a little disappointed when Ada had married and had had to give it up.
“Talk to me a little first, Ada Lee. There’s somethin’ eatin’ you. Has been all night.”
Ada was close to both her parents and always had been. She was the baby, come late in life, and their only girl. The whole family had treated her like the miracle they thought she was, and she’d been spoiled silly. Then, when she was still a silly, spoiled girl in pigtails, both her older brothers were killed in the same battle in the Great War. After that, in a house shrouded by grief, she’d no longer been spoiled or silly, but she’d been loved all the more deeply as the one bright spot in her parents’ life.
She’d always been able to talk to them about anything, but her mother was especially astute, hardly even needing Ada to say the words to know what was troubling her. Since the hard shells of cataracts had blocked her pale blue eyes, she seemed even more perceptive.
“Just regular troubles, Momma. The truck broke down, and Chancey doesn’t think it can be fixed.”
Her mother clucked her tongue and shook her head. “You remember when your daddy bought that old truck?”
“I do. Off the lot in Callwood.” Summer of 1929. They’d had a good few years, and 1929 had promised to bring in another good crop, so her father had decided he could afford to modernize a little. The truck had been eight years old then, and hard used, but well cared for. A few months later, the stock market had crashed, but that hadn’t meant much right away, here in the shadow of the mountains.
Soon enough, though, it had meant everything.
“I told him then we ain’t had no need of a motor car, but you know your daddy when he gets his mind on a thing.”
“It gave us another seven years, Momma. More than that. And they’ve been hard years. I don’t think it was a bad purchase.”
“Maybe not, but we’re back to the cart if the truck don’t run, right?”
“Right.”
“Your daddy’s back is bad, Ada Lee. He tries not to let me know it, but I hear him. He can’t drive a cart no more. Don’t you let him try.”
“I won’t. You’re right. Chancey’s working on getting the cart and harness back in shape, and then I’ll take the load in myself.” She patted her mother’s hand. “It’ll be alright, Momma. Everything’s gonna be alright.”
Though the cluck of her tongue against her strong teeth and the cynical twist of her mouth showed her disbelief in that empty assurance, her mother reached out to the nightstand and felt the spines of the books stacked there. She tapped one. “Is that Don Quixote?”
“Indeed it is. You’d like that one again?”
“Yes, I would.” She smiled and settled into the pillows, closing her foggy eyes. Though she was old enough that her hair, once the rosy gold Ada had inherited, had gone white, and her skin was loose and velvety, she was still a beautiful woman, small and slight but not frail. Not even the loss of her sight could make her vague or weak. “I always like to hear about that silly old fool.”
Ada slid the volume from the middle of the stack and leaned close to the bedside lamp as she opened it. “’Chapter One,’” she read, “’Which Treats of the Character and Pursuits of the Famous Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. In a certain corner of La Mancha, the name of which I do not choose to remember, there lately lived one of those country gentlemen, who adorn their halls with a rusty lance and worm-eaten target, and ride forth on the skeleton o
f a horse, to course with a sort of starved greyhound.’”
As she read, she caught the familiar flutter of her father’s shadow in the corner of her eye, standing just outside the bedroom door, listening to the story.
When Ada read five chapters, her mother said she was ready to sleep, so she slid a tattered envelope into the book to hold their place and kissed her good night. It had escaped neither of them that this nightly ritual was the mirror image of one from Ada’s childhood. She left the light on for her father and slipped out of the bedroom.
Her father was sitting in the kitchen with a glass of warm milk. He had a bad stomach, too, and on the single time she’d convinced him to see Doc Dollens about it, he’d been diagnosed with ulcer and told to keep away from spicy foods and to drink warm milk to coat his stomach. Ada wasn’t sure it was doing any good, but her father wasn’t one to complain.
“There’s a bit left in the pot, if’n you want to set with me a spell,” he said as she came in and set her hand on his shoulder.
Ada didn’t have ulcer, but a bit of warm milk was soothing before bed. She took a heavy mug down from the shelf and poured the rest of the pot in.
“Now your momma’s snug asleep, why don’t you say all Chancey told you today.”
“There’s not much more to tell, Daddy. He says the axle can’t be fixed.”
His face drew into a severe scowl. He’d lived a long, hard outdoor life, and it showed on flesh as creased and cracked and burnt red as the bed of a creek gone dry, but his green eyes flashed keenly. “Damn if I ain’t seven kinds a fool. I shoulda seen that hole was deeper than a puddle.”
That was the source of this trouble: her father had driven over what he’d thought was a puddle and had turned out to be a tiny sinkhole, only a foot wide but at least three feet deep and filled with water. Here in mining country, sinkholes were common, and they could show up out of nowhere. The hit had snapped the axle nearly in two. But in health of both the human and machine varieties, often one problem turned out to be the thing that made a bigger problem known.
“The axle can’t be fixed, but it’s not the axle that’s the end of the truck. The whole bottom’s near rusted through. Chancey said it was a matter of days, maybe, before the motor just fell out.” She reached over and set her hand over her father’s. “It’s alright, Daddy. He’s going to get the rig fixed up to pay me back for helping him with his momma’s papers, and I’ll take the harvest in as soon as I can hitch Henrietta up.”
“Corn’s already sittin’, Ada. Too much longer, we’ll get rot. ‘Twas a bad yield this year to start. Too damn much rain.” A curse word never passed his lips when Ada’s mother could hear, but he got them all out of his system when she couldn’t. He finished off his mug of milk and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “We ain’t gonna keep goin’ much longer like this, baby girl. That note I took out a couple years back, it’s gonna haunt us this year. Payments is already two behind, and I’s hopin’ to get even with this yield, but I don’t know. I hate to burden you with such trouble, but I got nobody else to say it to. I don’t know how’m gonna take care of your momma if I can’t get food in this larder.”
“Daddy. As long as we make enough to pay the bank, as long as we can keep this place, we’ll always be able to eat. We’ve got the garden, and we’ve got the chickens for eggs, and Polly and Emsie for milk and butter. I can earn enough helping with paperwork to keep the animals fed, and the animals will feed us. We won’t starve. The rest of it—well, someday things have got to get better. They just have to. We only need to hold on until they do.”
He smiled and patted her hand. “Y’always been our ray of sunny light. Ain’t never dark so long’s you’re here.”
That night, after she kissed her father good night and tidied up the few dishes from their shared warm milk, Ada closed herself in the small room that, but for a far too brief spell when she’d been a happily married woman with a home of her own, had been her bedroom all her life. There wasn’t much special about this room that showed the life it had held—no pictures or clipped photos of movie stars on the walls, no fancy, fanciful mementos of her childhood or adolescence, no keepsakes from friends. Since the death of her brothers, she hadn’t had many fancies, or many friends. Only one good friend, who’d died of influenza when they were sixteen.
The only adornment of the plain-papered wall was her framed teaching certificate. Atop her bureau, leaning against the mirror, was a single memento from a long-ago carefree childhood: a faded, frayed, oft-patched ragdoll her Granny Dee had made for her, its red yarn pigtails gone dusky pink with age.
The furniture was functional—a narrow bed in an iron frame, a bureau topped with a swivel mirror, a tall pine chifforobe for hanging clothes, and, beside the bed, a simple two-shelf bookcase, stuffed with all the books she owned. Sitting on its top was a small milk-glass lamp and a short stack of the books she was currently reading. Always, she was in the middle of reading a few different books, choosing one according to her mood at any given time when she had a moment to read. Books weren’t so easy to come by, and were luxuries besides, so she’d read those she’d acquired again and again—some, those she loved best, she’d read so often she had them memorized.
She shed her simple cotton dress, her plain slip and underclothes, her old, lace-up work shoes and darned stockings, and draped them all over the plain wood chair beside the door. Then she pulled her flannel nightgown from under her pillow and tugged it over her head. A sliver of wind came through the window she’d opened a crack and made the gown billow over her like a sheet on the line as it fell to her ankles. The gown was old and worn, and the flannel was soft as a lover’s kiss on her skin. For a moment, she wrapped her arms around her waist, feeling the hard curve of her ribs, the sharp inward sweep of her waist, and imagined—remembered—what it was to be held by a lover. By George, her husband, her only lover.
This aching loneliness had become a part of her body, the weight as real and familiar as another limb. Tim Conner down the road had come back from the Great War without his legs, and he spoke of terrible pains in the air where his knees should have been. Since she’d lost George, Ada thought she understood something of what Tim meant.
Allowing herself that small luxury of grief, Ada unfurled her arms and went to her bureau. She eased the pins from her hair and dropped them into a little glass dish. When her hair was loose, she ran her fingers through the mass and scratched lightly at her scalp, where the pins had poked for all the long hours of the day. Then she picked up her hairbrush and engaged in one of her few vanities: a hundred strokes, every night, to keep her long hair light and gleaming.
Her mother’s hair and her father’s eyes. All her life, people had said that to her—that she’d gotten the best features of both her parents. She’d heard it so many times the words had lost their meaning. But those features had captured George’s attention, too. Hair like fire, eyes like water, he’d said, so many times, from the first day he’d spoken to her to the last day he’d lived. Through his eyes, through his love, Ada had first seen that she was pretty. Before he’d looked at her, the concept had meant nothing. Now that his eyes were forever closed, the concept meant nothing again.
But she kept her hair the way he’d liked it, and when she looked into the mirror, and saw her pale green eyes and red-gold hair, she imagined George looking on the woman he loved and whispering hair like fire, eyes like water at her ear.
Chapter Two
It took Chancey and Ada’s father two days to get the rig ready, and then it was Sunday, so the corn sat another day until Ada could drive it into town. They lost a few bushels to rot in that time, but there was nothing for it. She’d go through those bushels and save what kernels she could, and grind them down for cornmeal.
Like all their neighbors in these Appalachian foothills, the McDaniel farm had never been much of a place. Just a single field of a few acres, rotating a few crops to keep the soil healthy. Some called them dirt farmers, but Ada’s
parents had always taken umbrage at that phrase. Still, there was no doubt that life in these parts meant scratching out each day straight from the ground.
On average, the yield was enough to keep the family sheltered and well and not much more. On good years, they had a little extra, to put in hot and cold running water, or buy a used truck. One year, after the wires came up this far, they were able to put electricity in. On bad years, years of drought or flood or infestation, it was all they could do to keep going.
Since this depression had started, there hadn’t been any good years.
After they got the wagon loaded, Ada led Henrietta out from the pasture and got her into the harness. The big bay mare hadn’t been harnessed for a few years, and she balked at the sight of it, tossing her head and digging her hooves into the dirt.
“Come now, girl,” Ada crooned, stroking the mare’s nose. She’d raised her from a filly and knew just the right tone so she’d calm. “We’re going to have an adventure today, you and I.”
Henrietta huffed noisily, unconvinced. But she lowered her head and pushed affectionately against Ada’s chest.
“I won’t make you work too hard, Hen. And when we get to town, I’ll share my lunch. How’s that sound?”
Her father chuckled. “You’d think that horse could understand what you’re sayin’, the way you make deals with her.”
“Who’s to say she can’t?” Ada smiled over her shoulder at her father and then turned back to her horse. “You know what I said, don’t you, Hen?”
Henrietta bobbed her head, like a nod, and Chancey, Ada, and her father all laughed.
When Ada tried again, Henrietta allowed herself to be harnessed.
“That’s my good girl.” Ada patted her neck and kissed her face. When she looked to her father and Chancey, they both stared at the harnessed horse, bemused.
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