“Look at these buttons, Lutie. They’re called paperweights.”
Lutie held a pink glass ball up to the light, turning it back and forth. “Why it’s like a little world in there. That little flower, there, it’s a pasque flower, isn’t it?”
Jeanie took it from her and examined it. “Why I suppose it is.”
“Almost like the fates knew you’d someday live where they grew wild.”
“My, my, my, aren’t they exquisite. Not like pearls, but still.” Jeanie had never loved the glass buttons. The pearl buttons were the ones that made her shudder with glee. She pulled another glass button from the box and held it up. Inside it was a teeny French house. France, oh to be there. Jeanie sighed and shook her head, feeling happy that Elizabeth had no idea of the value of the glass buttons, that she hadn’t pointed to them when she was acquiring Jeanie’s things. Jeanie stuffed the button into her pocket, loving the idea that another world lived inside the glass that sat beside her hip, that someday she’d be back in that world, out of the dirt and squalor. She took the button box into the dugout, planning to sort through them, to decide which should be used for which dresses and which should be never used, kept for Jeanie’s fantasies.
“I could use these for your dress, Lutie.”
“I haven’t had a fitting yet, you’re aware. Now that you bring it up. I don’t presume to be forward in regard to the dress you promised to fashion, but that fabric in that first trunk…“
“Well, let me measure you. Two fittings is all I need.”
“Two? I’m sure you’ll need more than that. Greta is one thing, but I am a little more, shall we say, subtle in appearance.”
“Two, Lutie. That’s all I need.”
“It’ll fit like a thumbless man’s wagon cover with but two fittings!”
“With the time you’re wasting, it’s already lunch. You’ll be lucky if I get to two fittings at all with you. I’ll fit you after we eat.”
Lutie shrugged like a ten-year-old in response, but made Jeanie all the more sure that she was exactly what Lutie needed to further develop her personhood.
Chapter 8
Jeanie rang the lunch bell then rummaged through the materials in the trunk some more, with Lutie over her shoulder pointing to her favorites. They waited for the chirping of the kids that should have followed. But instead of happy voices, what she heard next was a great sound of crackling, whooshing, and wind so strong that she almost thought she could see it if she hopped above the dugout to look.
Jeanie looked at Lutie who had frozen in the middle of laying a fork next to a plate, head lifted, face paled as though a mask of fear had been placed over her.
“What?” Jeanie said. Lutie shook her head but didn’t move.
Jeanie ran around to the top of the dugout and saw blackness sitting atop the brightest wall of orange and red and yellow that she’d ever have imagined before that time. “Frank! Fire! It’s a fire! The children! Where are the children!”
Frank, atop the horse, galloped toward her, yelling that the fire had already swept past the Zurchenko homestead, the Moore’s, and was obviously heading right for them.
“The gully? Did the fire jump the gully?”
Frank looked away, into the flames that were growling like a mythological beast, gorging itself, crackling. Frank had dismounted and yelled that Lutie and Jeanie should get on the horse and just ride as fast as they could to Templeton’s. He’d prepared for times like this with firebreaks.
But as Lutie climbed atop the dugout, the horse spooked and bolted, dragging Frank with it. After a few yards, Frank let go of the reins and scrambled to his feet, running back to the women. The flames, behind Frank, rushed toward them, so thick that even though still one hundred yards away, Jeanie could feel the heat. She collapsed to the ground. Sobbing, head buried in her arms, she curled into a ball. Lutie yelled at Frank and though Jeanie couldn’t hear the specific words, Lutie was clearly giving him instructions of some sort. And before Jeanie knew what was happening, Lutie had hauled her up and dragged her down the hillside, around the front of the dugout. It was then she heard Lutie’s words, that the flames would leap over the dugout, that it shouldn’t burn the sod barn, and that Frank should get the cow inside it. She was quite clear that their home wouldn’t be destroyed and neither would they if they made it inside.
Jeanie didn’t close the dugout door until Frank sprinted back after closing in the cow. The three of them stood, Jeanie near the front door, Frank by the lounge and Lutie by the cook-stove, in the dark dugout, no one moving to add candlelight or oil lamp glow. The sound of their scratchy breathing, occasional whimpers, and shrieks of disbelief didn’t require light. Jeanie spread the curtains as far wide as possible and watched as orange flames ate past the window, keeping an odd ten-foot distance as though there was a reason to do so.
Watching those flames made Jeanie want to die, to find a way to harm herself if the fire itself didn’t. She would not live without her children. Stunned, body shaking to its core, she turned from the window and fell back against the dirt wall. Frank pointed to the roof of the house and Lutie nodded. The roar of the flames running over the dugout, the realization that they were sitting inside the fire made Jeanie woozy, and before long, everything went black as night.
Jeanie came to, Frank squeezing her cheeks, moving her face back and forth. It took her a second to remember the flames, to be engulfed in the pain that accompanied knowing her children had just been swallowed up in the most painful death there could possibly be.
The fire that chomped at the land like a lion would gnaw its prey. Frank’s face hung above Jeanie’s and Lutie stood behind him, her chest heaving with deep, silent breath. The sound of the earth crisping had passed while Jeanie had been unconscious and in the dugout, a hush as loud as the flames had been, saturated the space.
Jeanie pushed Frank aside. He tried to keep her down, but she punched his shoulder, making him draw back and give her space to move and run to the window. Though mid-day, the earth and sky had gone black, choked with smoke that tumbled from the sky and hovered just over the ground, as though teasing it with descending then receding smoke streams.
It was only in seeing its blackness, the golds and yellows zapped from the earth, that visions of the original greens, purples, and blues rushed to Jeanie. Her teeth chattered as she scolded herself for noticing such things, for caring about the colors of the prairie when her children had been wiped from that same prairie, extinguishing their lives. She pulled at her hair, wanting to inflict pain on herself in a bodily sense to take away the pain of her spirit.
She ran to the cook-stove where a knife hung above it. She grabbed it and poised it across from her heart as though about to stab it into her body. It would end everything for her, the pain, the sight of her burnt children, or worse, not finding them at all. She could not live that way, with those images fried into her brain.
Frank nearly tackled her to wrench the knife from her hand.
“You give that back to me. You are not my father, you cannot control my life.”
Frank ignored her and tucked the knife between the bedstead and the wall. Jeanie paced the floor, wishing she had thrown herself into the flames as they passed by.
Jeanie yanked on the hot door, ignoring the scalding handle. The door stuck then gave way, sending Jeanie backward onto her bottom. She scrambled to her feet.
Lutie and Frank implored her to stop, saying it was too smoky and searing hot to attempt to walk around.
“Those are my children! Our children!” Jeanie poked her finger accusingly at Frank’s shocked face. She stepped outside where the charred heat bore right through her boots, making that tedious human instinct toward survival kick in, and so, she shut the door, and lay her forehead against it, trying to divine the spirits of her children as they must be circling the dugout, having come to bid goodbye before heading into Heaven, wishing the God she wasn’t sure she believed in would perform a miracle and take her life right then.
>
Jeanie plastered her head and hands against the hot door, awaiting the smoke to clear so she could find their bodies, their little, innocent bodies. She squeezed her eyes at the thought of them crisp as smoked pheasant.
“Nonononononono! This can’t be happening! This can’t be happening!” She pounded slowly on the door. Running through one track of her mind was the conversation Lutie and Frank were having behind her—how Lutie had saved them by forcing them down the hill into the dugout—Frank’s words tripping over one another as he repeated their children’s names, pronouncing them dead.
Slamming down another track of her brain was the intellectual agreement that Frank was right. That Jeanie had been right in believing they were dead, how could they not be? But in hearing Frank wail and moan and tread in his pain while Lutie soothed at him, another track in Jeanie’s mind took over saying there was no way they were dead.
That their family had suffered plenty and there was no way God would push pain further into their good souls. Simultaneously, she told herself, as she’d suspected there wasn’t really a God at all. Not one like she’d learned about as a child. There was no God, not in places like that. She’d kill herself if even one of her children was dead. She’d have to.
And, it was all Frank’s fault. His big dreams and flailing, wild energy that, this time, put them in a position they couldn’t reverse or tackle or transform. Every bit of it, them being on the prairie in the first place, him convincing her to let the children roam like livestock. Jeanie ripped away from the door and began swinging at Frank. Anger broke loose from the recesses of her bones and flooded her bloodstream, took over her actions and sent her smacking and kicking and wailing at Frank. “Now, you stop your bawling! You help me send good thoughts to the kids! They’re alive! They are not dead! So gather yourselves up and just…well, find some belief and make it real.”
Jeanie stopped hitting and covered her mouth with her hand. She had never been the violent type. She shuddered and quivered as she replayed her actions in her mind. She’d never felt so out of control and hateful and empty. Frank stood, staring at her, crying without sobbing. Tears snaked through the black soot on his cheeks, the whites of his eyes flamed red, matching the flames that had driven by. Lutie’s jaw slackened, her eyes shifted, showing fear.
Jeanie bit the inside of her cheek. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” It was that moment that Jeanie found some clarity in what kind of character she possessed. She’d lived her life, prior to prairie life, moving from one special event to the next, aspects of them stilled and sealed in her mind to mull over after the fact.
Like paintings in a museum, or drawings in her publications, the actual scene at the time of the rendering didn’t matter—the afterimage was paramount, the pictures that Jeanie revisited, enjoying more than the events themselves. It was then she realized the prairie would not afford her that kind of existence. It would be minute-to-minute experience that would leave afterimages she preferred to forget.
“You are cold and mercenary,” Frank said, his voice as cold as he proclaimed her innards to be.
“I’m not cold, Frank. I’m just not…” Jeanie leaned her forehead against the door.
“Not what,” Frank said.
Like her mind was suddenly as organized as the card catalog in the Des Moines public library, Jeanie sorted through scads of words she could use in the next exchange, but she was sure to be careful in her selection. “I’m not you.”
A crack suddenly tore through the relative silence and settling smog. The three in the dugout jumped at the crisp, pointed noise. Jeanie and Frank looked around and went to the window. What could it be now?
“Thunder,” Lutie said. “It’s going to rain.”
And, before Jeanie could wrench the door open, pellets of rain were pitting the land, cleansing it. The earth hissed as it accepted the water with the joy it would feel if it could. Although it was not cool enough to head into the plains yet, Jeanie shoved a water bucket and a water pail outside to gather the falling rain. It was a sign. Jeanie was surer than ever the children were somehow safe, even if she didn’t know how they could possibly be.
Marble-sized raindrops pummeled the earth for some time. When she could stand it no longer, Jeanie risked her feet burning on the scorched ground, and tore out of the dugout and up the side. She stood there as thick drapes of wind and water plummeted and pushed and shifted direction, thrusting her body from side to side. Jeanie dug in and waited for it to slow enough that she would be able to start looking for the children. She raised her hands heavenward and closed her eyes to the barrage. She could feel her children, sense them breathing as sure as she was herself. They were alive.
When she managed to force her eyes open, she could see needle straight bolts of lightning marching toward her then forming webs in the sky, nearly surrounding her in their flame. She wasn’t afraid of dying, knowing that if she could stand in that storm and live, her kids would certainly have been saved a similar miracle. She would make it so, if only in her head it was true, that was okay.
Like the waves of cramps that often gripped her, the rain dumped over her then lessened before brutalizing her again, before totally fading away. She turned, looking around, stretching her hearing for voices, anything human. Frank and Lutie joined her atop the dugout. Lutie grasped Frank’s arm as though he were her father, but her expression, the way she allowed him to hold her up and look at him in what was clearly an adoring fashion, made Jeanie think Lutie’s motives were anything but childlike.
They headed out onto the land, not sure where they were going, but they followed Jeanie without a single question as to why. They walked for a time, plodding over the ebony dirt.
“There!” Frank pointed, pulled his arm free of Lutie and began to sprint toward the open land—the bee tree. From that distance, Jeanie could see, three shapes that interrupted the expected straightness of a tree, as though it grew goiters during the storm. She got closer and her mind began chanting, it’s the children, the children, the children.
Jeanie hoisted her dress and ran so hard she passed Frank. She grunted like an animal, bursting at the sight. If the children were in the tree, they must be alive, for if they’d died, they’d have fallen out. Surely they would have lost their grips.
Jeanie’s feet pounded over the earth and her screams sliced through the now still air, becoming shrill as an animal caught in a trap. The children were motionless, non-responsive. Jeanie reached the tree, and grabbed its trunk trying to shake them out of it like fruit. They didn’t flutter or show at all they were alive.
Jeanie stopped beating on the tree, settled her screaming and stepped away to get a better view of the three of them. Katherine was highest in the tree, then Tommy and James under him.
“James!” Jeanie’s voice was tinny in her ears. She struggled to steady her voice, to make it reassuring to the children rather than alarming. “James. You three come down right now. This is no time for tree climbing.” Jeanie’s voice shook again. She could not wait to get her hands on them.
James finally made a move, looking over his shoulder as his arms were still gripped around the trunk. “Mama?”
At once Katherine and Tommy began repeating her name then shimmied down the tree so fast they landed atop one another as they reached the ground. The three of them heaped together, alive, clearly alive. Frank, Lutie and Jeanie cheered, pulling them apart, lying each on his or her back, eyes gaping, but blank. They shook their heads as though they’d never seen the adults before.
They tried to pull the children to sitting, but they were slack from their muscles having been tensed for an extended period of time. Jeanie suspected they felt as though they’d completed a full week’s planting in just a few hours.
When it was clear her children might be struck dumb for some time, though able to walk, the six of them plodded back to the dugout, holding one another up, not speaking of the great exhilaration at gaining a perspective on life that hadn’t been availab
le until that very instant. By the time they reached home, Tommy had regained his voice and in his normal melodramatic manner, he retold the events that led them up the tree.
Soon after that, James engaged, explaining how they’d been lugging the water home when they heard the fire crackling toward them. Even before they saw the flames, James knew what was coming. In the oddest way, though he’d never been amid flames, he knew what was happening.
“Templeton and I had just logged the day’s conditions— the dryness, the temperature, the winds, the pressure. Oh, Templeton—his frame house—where could he have hidden during the fire?” James’ voice rose in pitch. Jeanie held him around the waist even tighter.
Jeanie wanted to tell him not to worry, that nothing could have happened to Templeton because he was too nice a person to have anything befall him. But as she inventoried her memory of the fire, its fierceness, she knew it couldn’t have barreled through this dry land and not have killed someone.
Katherine sipped water and joined the retelling. Her face lit up, eyes wide and expressive as though intoxicated from having survived to tell it. “And I didn’t want to get rid of the water, Mama. I just wanted to run home, but James said we’d never outrun the flames.” Katherine spoke with her hands, illustrating her words.
“So we took the hand wagon with the rocks we’d filled for the wall around the property and laid them, circled them around the tree and doused the whole area with water. James just kept repeating that if the bee tree had lived fifty years on the plain so far, it wouldn’t let them down then.”
Tommy nodded enthusiastically while James picked at the mud on the bottom of his boot.
“And I just kept thinking of the light inside me,” Katherine said."Like the Quaker preacher Mrs. Hunt said. And I figured if the light was in me, it had to be in the tree. That God, in all of us, was more powerful than a great old fire. And the boy. He came and told me to hang on. He kept saying hang on, hang on, that if I lost my grip, I’d topple us all to the flames.”
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