“It’s too cold, Ray. You’ll get nothing from her.”
He studied the cow again, letting her chin rest on the lip of his boot as if he didn’t want to drop her snout. “Just bring them, why don’t you?”
I walked back to the barn. A butchering, so late in the season, when even the river was frozen to a standstill. My lantern we would need and torches. Something to keep a fire going. Inside, Agnes sat cross-legged in the hay, the calf quiet at her knees. It was loose-legged and weak, far too young to be feeding by hand.
“Will she eat?” I asked.
Agnes shook her head.
I opened a canvas sack and loaded our saw and knives. “We found the mother by the fence.”
My sister looked up. “What are you doing?”
I threw the sack over my shoulder. Agnes had never done a butchering, had never seen more than a chicken on a block or used such a knife herself. None of my sisters had.
“We need your help.”
Through the morning and into the early afternoon, we stayed by the fence with the cow. She was hard as bone, but Ray thought if we held the torches close, we could free just enough, and she wouldn’t be such a waste. There might be something warm in her yet.
“Too good an animal to go,” he said. Lee would have said the same.
His gloves turned bloody, his face grim. He didn’t look at anything but the box saw in his hand. I held my knife, but it was Ray who cut at the animal with a vengeance, bent to get it done. The hide was thick with ice, but the saw was sharp, and when it finally broke through the belly, it cut straight and fine. Deeper in, the innards steamed. Ray stopped to shake his hand and started again. My own grip didn’t have such strength, my cuts thin, and always the rush of bile in my throat. Agnes crouched near us with a torch, her head turned away. Ray had to remind her to hold the fire close, to look at what she was doing, but she never looked much. I tried to distract myself with numbers and meals—how this work might help us in the months to come, how good the meat would be to store in the smokehouse, saving another animal down the line. The cow’s face had turned an icy gray, the ground around her melted to mud. Soon there was only the stillness of the fields and the snow stained under our boots. Agnes pressed her hand over her nose.
“Ray, isn’t it enough?” I asked.
He stretched his fingers. “Agnes, if you’re just going to stand there . . .”
“I’m holding the torch as close as I can.”
“She’s worried about the calf is all,” I said.
Ray grimaced. His chin was trembling, but he bent to cut again.
“Agnes,” I explained, “you have to try.”
Her eyes shone. “Lee’s the one who should be here.”
“You know very well where Lee is,” I answered.
“It’s not fair, all of them leaving us to do everything. What if they never come back?”
“Stop sniveling,” Ray said.
“But Lee is coming,” I told her. “As soon as he can.”
Ray wiped his nose. “She doesn’t want to do the work.”
“You never thought about going to Chicago.” Agnes glared at him. “You never even tried.”
Ray wrenched the torch in her grip closer to the open stomach. She nearly fell.
“Don’t you care about anything?” Agnes cried. She dropped the torch. The skin on her fingers had blistered under the flame. I pulled her quickly to her knees, buried her fist in the snow, but she only cried out again. “You don’t, do you?”
Ray raised his arm to strike her, but I caught his elbow.
“Ray!”
The shout came from far across the yard, a figure pressing through the snow. Father was bound in his coat and hat, walking with the wind. When he reached us, he tore the saw from my brother and bent to cutting, signaling to me with his chin to take up the torch. “Agnes, go home,” he said, his eyes down. He cut with steady blows. “Nan, the torch.” I lit it fresh. Soon Ray joined in with my knife, and Agnes stood in the snow, sniffling. She spun toward the house, her skirts wet and her hair sticking to her cheeks.
“I should go after her,” I said. “She’s burned.”
Father lurched back and mopped his forehead. The cow was nearly quartered now, the meat greasy in the snow. He stared at me, his eyes cold, such a lost look on his face with the frost clinging to his beard. I bent my head and held the torch close.
Later in the washhouse, I leaned against the wall, if only to rest. We had finished with the cow well enough, and the house through the open door blazed with light, but I wasn’t in any hurry to reach it, not in any hurry to sit at the dinner table and bring a fork to my mouth. I closed my eyes. It was rags I needed to dress Agnes’ burn. We kept them in a bucket in the washhouse for scalding. They would want bleaching, yes, but already they would be torn in long slivers, a dozen or so for changing day and night. I dug into the bucket. These were our old long johns and underskirts, our coarser linens. Most were too threadbare to take a needle to again—though I had often tried—too outgrown to pass onto another child. Despite my every stitch, they ended up rags. Now from the bottom of the pile came something else. In my hand was one of Myrle’s good dresses, a blue crepe I had made her for Easter the year before.
When had I seen her wear it last?
I laid the dress out in pieces and held up my lantern. My stitches stood along the hem. Stains spotted it front and back, as if the girl had rolled in something in her playing. The dress had been torn in half and half again, bundled up like a hated thing. Folding the pieces together, I crushed them in my hand, a sob rising in my throat. That girl. With no mind to the expense and the time I had spent. The time I didn’t have.
At dinner that night, I watched the others at the table. Ray and Father hunched at either end, their faces chapped. Ray bit at a bloody tear of skin on his lip. Across the table, Agnes wouldn’t look at him, her bandaged fingers heavy in her lap. Outside, the fire we had lit to finish what was left of the animal smoked low in the distance. It wouldn’t last. I’d carried the dress back to the house, closed it away in my bureau until I could decide what it meant—if it meant anything. Never make too much. For so many years, I had lived and worked close enough to my siblings I could name their breathing in the dark, but now in every quiet face, I sensed something hidden. The way Patricia gnawed at her bread. The way Ray gripped his fork with those crooked fingers, his knuckles white. My youngest sister, tucking her good dress away with the rags. If she could do such a thing—so ordinary, one might think, but possibly not—what might my other siblings be planning?
“Such sour faces,” Patricia let out. She helped herself to another bowl of soup. Unlike the rest of us, the woman had not lost weight the last few months but instead thickened in her grief. Ray caught her wrist to stop her spoon, but she shook him off. “Lee would have eaten two or more bowlfuls,” she said. “Now, I’m not saying one way or another, but I never knew that boy to be gone for more than a day. Other than the war, that is. And not a word for weeks.”
Father threw his napkin on the table. He walked down the hall, banging his door closed after he went. The dining room seemed to shrink, the lantern bright. Agnes tried to pull her sleeve over her bandage, but the sleeve was far too short—I hadn’t once this season taken a needle to let out her hems.
“He must have run out of money,” Patricia went on. “Even when he telegrammed, he never gave us an address that lasted more than a night.”
“He will write when he writes,” I said, but I wasn’t so sure about that.
Patricia grated her spoon against the bottom of her bowl. “A little conversation at a meal. That’s all I ask.”
Ray raised his head, bleary-eyed.
“I don’t see anything wrong with showing some warmth to each other,” Patricia said. “Like normal people. Normal people talking about what’s on their minds.”
Agnes reddened, but I didn’t have the heart to play peacemaker, not then.
“Nan agrees with me,” Patricia said, “Don’t you, Nan?”
“You want to talk about Lee,” Ray asked. “Is that the kind of talk you want?”
Patricia slumped. “Well, yes . . .”
“The boy can’t remember where he put his own hat when it’s on his head.”
“Nan,” Agnes started. “Do you hear what he’s saying?”
Ray swung his knife. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he never finds his way back.”
“You wouldn’t?” Patricia gasped.
“You can’t say that.” Agnes looked at me. “He can’t.”
“And you.” Ray pointed at Agnes. “If you want to run away too, then go on, why don’t you? All of you. Just you try it.”
Patricia dropped her spoon in her bowl. “Ray, I never . . .” He rested his arms on either side of his plate, too tired to lift a finger though his face seemed anything but. Patricia touched his cheek. He pressed a hand over his eyes. “No one’s leaving,” Patricia whispered to him. Down the hall, a door fell shut. We turned our heads. I pictured Father having listened to us in the dark, the door cracked open again, until he’d heard enough.
“It will be okay, won’t it, Nan?” Agnes asked, her cheeks hot. “Like you said?”
I stood to gather the plates. A fork fell to the floor. When I dropped to my knees to fetch it, the dark under the table showed three pairs of legs and three laps. The empty chairs looked cold, the rest of us nothing more than cuts of wood. I imagined Myrle’s dress again, strung up as if from a rope outside that window. In my mind it hung starched and ironed, a paper cutout for a paper doll. I made to stand, but something burned from my stomach to the bridge of my nose. I left the fork where it fell and headed for the kitchen, carrying away the rest of our meal, finished or not.
That night I shut myself away in my room and thought about Carl. A hero, the grocer had called him. He’d even won himself a Cross. Lee had served in the war, but he didn’t have much but the limp to show for it. Both my brothers had worked the land for years, but it wasn’t the thing of medals. And it didn’t save our family from whatever the town cared to make of us. We were foreigners—no matter how long ago Father and Mother had staked their claim. And land grubbers at that. The parents who couldn’t trouble themselves to learn their English proper, to change their name. The children who pretended they didn’t know their native tongue. We were fooling no one. If anyone had seen Carl together with me, I knew just what they thought: What was the man doing spending time with the Hess girl again? A girl so tall and plain, the one the neighbors could only call handsome. The kind of girl too proud to keep a man’s ring. Wasn’t she rather old for such things? Before the war, even my family had been surprised.
A knock on my door. “Nan?”
“Go to bed, Agnes.”
“Are you all right?”
I imagined her waiting, her hand raised to knock again, the one that had been burned.
“Nan?”
I opened the door and lay back in my bed. Agnes pinched at her skirts and eased herself onto the edge of my mattress. “You looked like you were going to be sick in there.”
I didn’t answer.
“How can you stand the way those two go on? It makes me want to scream.” She fiddled with her bandage.
“Have you seen Myrle’s comb?” I asked.
“Her comb?”
“The one she keeps on her dresser.”
“I never saw it.”
“Agnes.”
She sighed and reached into her pocket. “I didn’t think you’d want it.” When she drew it out, the comb seemed nothing more than a piece of bone, no larger than her palm. She laid it on the mattress between us and I rubbed my thumb against the handle. “I’ve hardly used it,” Agnes said. “Really. I only thought . . .”
Between my bitten fingers, the comb was soft with strands of Myrle’s hair, the same ivory as the handle, and Agnes’ darker strands threaded through. “Agnes, those posters you made . . .”
“You know how hard I worked on those.”
“But sometimes when I try to think of the girls, all I see are those drawings. Their faces don’t move anymore.”
Agnes took my hand and held it in both her own, though it pained her to do so. “Nan, don’t quit on me now. I couldn’t stand it.”
“I’m not quitting.”
She turned my fingers over as a child would, studying them.
“Fine,” I said. “Everything will be all right.”
She smiled at that. The bandage on her fingers was trim and white. Earlier it had shown spots where her blisters had broken, but she must have changed it herself. When had she grown so old, this sister? She was nearly nineteen and far from a girl—though I had trouble thinking of her as anything but. “Can’t we just say it’s done?” I wanted to ask her, but I didn’t. Not even to myself. Waiting was a grim thing. Just outside our door, years seemed to pass, when it’d only been months.
Come now, Agnes, Mother had said when it came to Esther and Myrle. Be a big girl. Help out. She was always one for helping, Agnes was. The forgotten one, stunted. The one in the middle of us. She sat across from me now full in the flesh. Without my having noticed, she’d dropped my hand.
“If I show you something, do you promise not to tell?” I asked.
“What is it?”
“In the bottom drawer of my bureau. Can you fetch it?”
She slipped off the bed. From the drawer, she drew out the pieces I had folded together. “This is Myrle’s dress.”
“I found it with the rags in the washhouse. Do you remember the last time she wore it?”
Agnes looked the pieces over, fingering the stains on the skirt and back.
“I can only think she went out playing in it and got muddy,” I said. “She knew I’d be angry at that.”
“Or Father would.”
“Father, yes.”
“But Nan, she loved this dress. It doesn’t look like mud. It looks like something else.” She held it to her nose.
I steadied my voice. “You said they ran away.”
She went to the door and called Patricia’s name. Our sister-in-law came running. “What is it?”
Agnes held out the dress. “What do you think this is?”
“It’s a dress,” Patricia said.
“But the stains.”
Patricia sniffed them, and she drew back. “That’s blood, that’s what that is. I’d know it anywhere with all of Ray’s wash after butchering.”
“Then it’s from one of the animals,” I said.
“Maybe,” Agnes said.
“This is Myrle’s dress, isn’t it?” Patricia pieced the fabric together. “I just knew something was wrong. Chicago. I knew it couldn’t be that. Otherwise, Lee would have found them.”
“It’s only a dress,” I said. “It could be mud for all we know.”
“That’s not mud,” Patricia said.
“But you told us they ran away,” I started again. “And we believed you, even if it didn’t feel right.”
“Something must have happened,” Patricia said. “Something terrible.”
“Maybe I was wrong,” Agnes let out.
My eyes blurred. I raised a hand, wanting to slap away what she said. They both flinched.
“Nan?”
“Oh, Nanny,” Agnes said.
“Get out. The both of you.”
“We have to tell Ray . . .”
But I didn’t give them the chance to finish. Taking both of their arms, I pushed them out into the hall and closed my door behind them. I bundled the dress tightly then and folded it away in the drawer.
The blame was mine. That’s what I knew then. Why, I had forgotten my sisters so much as to raise my hand. I�
�d thought only of hems and bedtimes, chores that begged for doing, and all the many ways I could escape them. When Mother was ill, how often had I dreamt of it? That fence with its four sides and the small stretch of land. The fence painted blue. The square of earth in between, a place of my own where if I opened the gate I could invite someone in. Hello, Nan, Carl had said in town. I was wondering where you’d gone. I could only answer, I haven’t gone anywhere. In the past weeks, Carl had not made his visit, and now I was convinced he never would. We were a practical family, he knew. We kept to ourselves. But underneath he must have sensed something new at fault. I’m different, I reminded him. The town had said as much in years past. And though we were innocent then, now with the girls missing, we seemed anything but.
Outside, a heavy crash. I sat up in bed, the wind fierce against the panes. Taking hold of my lantern, I rushed into the hall and opened the front door. A plank of wood lay on the porch. It must have blown from the barn or one of the outhouses, but the barn itself had disappeared in the storm. One of the Elliots’ shepherds barked, and out in the southernmost field, a shadow quivered. For an instant, it showed itself against the snow, then it was gone. The calf. Looking for her mother. Somehow she had gotten out.
I pulled on my boots, looked back at the shuttered house, and stepped into the snow. My feet sank, the crest higher than my knees. The shadow loped and cried silently in the distance. Behind me the house seemed as if it might float, the snow blanketing the windows, and only the lantern I carried and a dim lamp in the parlor gave any brightness. The calf was running, stumbling as it went and caught near to stopping, and soon I was running too. The snow was thick under my boots. The cold burned my cheeks. The calf fell in the drifts, but surely when I caught it, I could take it up in my arms. I could deliver the creature from the storm, leave my coat by the fire to dry, and have done my part. I was close enough to believe I might reach out and feel the calf under my glove. Instead my boot kicked something hard. There wasn’t a sound but the snow, nothing I could touch but cold and ice—and it wasn’t the calf at all. A tree limb stood high in the drift, ripped from a far-off pine and blown. A tear of canvas stuck against it and swayed like a living thing. I touched the wood, felt its spine. The canvas tore away in my hand.
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