by Joan Chase
Of her children, Grace helped Lil the most and seemed to feel the closest to her, always hanging around and taking an extra chore. She would say to Lil, her black eyes concerned, appealing, “When I grow up I’ll buy you the prettiest dress in the world and we’ll wear hats and go to tea.”
“Phooey,” was all Lil would reply, impatient with romantic nonsense. Better put your money in the bank or buy a spread of land. You’ll be needing it. As for putting Lil in a silk dress, you may as well dress up a sow and put it in the parlor: she hated the way she’d come to look so soon, all stomach and a wrinkled face.
Mostly she tried to ignore her appearance, the way she ignored whatever she couldn’t mend. If Jacob would finally come home and then, for spite, spill the evening’s milk over the floor, or do some other fool trick, Lil would scream at him until she choked, while beside her on the floor, cleaning up, Grace would cry, making something hurt worse inside Lil so that she’d snarl for her to get away. The child’s sympathy weakened her, another female groveling at the foot of a man. The very effort of cleaning up, though, was relieving in its own way, and Lil let her flare-ups with Jacob slide out of her mind, and planned for the children. She kept them in school, sewed their clothes, raised chickens out back for the egg money that would give Eleanor (as she spelled her name then) music lessons. It was indulgent and the others resented the favoring, but Lil figured Eleanor to be the most promising, the one who might eventually get away altogether. The piano could still be played; a draped shawl concealed the disfigurement. For Lil it was a reminder that changes can come in the twinkling of an eye.
And her life did change just about that fast and that miraculously. When Lil was our Gram, this was the one story she relished telling, the one she treasured. There she was, as she saw it, living her whole life up to her elbows in a copper washtub, her face hag-lined from steam and exposure, as though it bore the punishment directly for what it had brought her, when her entire prospect changed and she, like the Goose Girl, was acknowledged as the true princess.
“It begun at the reunion,” Gram started the story. “Naturally the old chap”—she meant Grandad, this tale making her more tolerant than usual—“wasn’t nowheres about, off helling. But I had my children with me, even May from over yonder where she’d gone to live with her husband. And they was all looking right, clean, with here and there a touch of fashion to show they were somebody. We went over in the wagon and it was the nicest sort of a day. The girls felt it too, and when we stopped to rest on the way, Grace and Eleanor picked bunches of daisies and lace out of the fields so that when we pulled into my aunt’s yard, we were singing, all of us wearing flowers, including the horse.
“I was having my first day off in a while, though I was busy enough chasing after Libby and Rachel. Of course I did my share, helping the women with the dinner too. Along in the late afternoon, when all the food was a shambles and we was sitting on the grass resting, some of the younguns asleep and nearly all of the men, who hadn’t done a thing all day but stuff themselves, we heard one of them new motorcars on the road, chugging along. And then it pulled up our road and stopped in front. We was too startled to even tidy our hair, just staring. Out of this car steps a fine-dressed man, wearing a tailored suit with starched cuffs and collar, purely white. It didn’t take but a second for Aunt Molly to know it was her brother Burl come back from California, New York City, the world. She was on him quick as a wink, hugging and crying over him, saying, ‘Now ain’t he the limit,’ over and over. She took him around to visit with all of us and he made a great fuss over Hat and me especially because of our mother, who was his favorite sister. My girls was always a credit to me, pretty and sweet-natured, none of them a bit lazy. He seemed to notice they was a cut over the others and everyone knew I’d never had it easy with Jacob. I thanked him for the piano and pointed out Eleanor, who could play it—she was always the prettiest thing too, with that bright hair, like my ma’s. And Grace had that dimple in her chin and was so devoted to the others; I could see how taken Uncle Burl was with watching her and Libby playing, daisies still wound through their hair. He give every one of them kids a silver dollar, and they come up to show me, big-eyed. A little shamefaced too, so I figured they’d been telling him how we lived on North Street with the Italians. But I spoke right out to them, same as always: ‘You just be proud you have such a fine uncle and don’t ever let being poor shame you, unless you never tried not to be.’
“Uncle Burl ate some of the dinner that was left and then looked at his gold watch and said he had to leave. Before that, he went with Molly on a tour through the house, and after coming out he stared at it awhile, the house he’d been born in, hunkering down under two maples with sunset bringing out the windows’ gleam more than Aunt Molly could, and she was famous for the way she kept that house. He made all of us a sort of bow, formal and dignified. Kissed his sister. I was standing off to one side of the car, holding Rachel, who was asleep on my shoulder, and he come over to look me directly in the eye. ‘I’m taking care of you, Lil,’ he says. His exact words. And by the dead serious way he said it, I knew it was so. I thought to myself: I’m going to be all right. I am. And maybe I’m even going to be rich. One day. It was coming to me from a man and it was going to save me from one, just like the world was paying me a debt. Inside I felt so free, thinking: How do you like that, old mister? I wanted to see his face when he got the news.”
But when she did see Jacob he seemed more pathetic than dangerous and she didn’t have the energy to tell him what was what. Not just then. Until he made her furious enough to pitch him out; then she told him that she didn’t have to answer to him no more, that he could leave and never come back, far as she cared. He went off for a while but was home before long, dragging his tail, no place to go, and it didn’t seem worth it to rile him again. And when he came to her unsteady and flushed, impatient and harsh with her, the way he always was when he was wanting that one thing, she took a backward glance at pride and ultimatums and shut her mouth. If it hadn’t killed her by then, likely it wouldn’t. And she didn’t figure getting maimed or having the children hurt on account of him. Not when life was finally starting to happen to her. With one of the early checks from Uncle Burl she had bought a brand-new nightdress. She lay in the dark wearing it, and Jacob never saw it or felt the difference in the material, and Lil cried some of the tears she’d stored up —the last time she would cry over that. After Jacob dropped off to sleep she removed the gown and put on the old one. It could wait until she slept alone. After that, his wanting her seemed as perverse as tales she’d heard of men desiring the dead. She felt that hard.
Once Uncle Burl was dead the money came in fast. It took the old Nick out of Jacob quicker than Lil’s patience was being used up, and he began to let her alone. By the time she bought the farm and they moved into the big brick house, he went off to the back bedroom meek as a lamb and never bothered her again. Not in that way, though he was resentful to the end of his days and stood up against her for meanness and spite. Lil would ignore him and fight him by turns. Feel sorry for him. More than anything she seemed to feel he was a nuisance, getting in her way, trying to get attention like one of the kids. Partly, though, it made her feel stronger to have Jacob around. There he was, living proof of where she had been. “I felt like I’d been let out of a prison.”
Eventually Gram owned, beside the farm, three houses in town, four places of business and later another couple of farms to the south, bought for speculation in gas and oil. Sundays she would drive to see the tenants there to talk about the crops and the nearby wells that were coming through. While she talked we stared away at the tiered steel rigs poking up out of the rolling pastureland, steeple-like spires that could have been proclaiming a new religion, higher than the corn and wheat. And more productive too, Gram said, when afterwards we’d drive around to see if more land was for sale. She vowed it was peculiar—her father spent his life in the West, searching for oil, when all along it was right out back
under the corn crib. Now wasn’t that just like a man? Like life.
We were still waiting for Grandad to go to the mill. It seemed he would never wake up. We walked down to the barn so he couldn’t run out on us. From where the house sat, the land sloped at a gradual downward tilt and didn’t become really level again until the far creek bottom. The barn was built into a mound of earth, with a stone foundation and then boards dried to tinder, topped off by a cupola. It belonged to Grandad and Grandad to it; it seemed in the same opposition he was to the encampment of fun-loving females who had seized the manor house and held it by superior numbers and adaptability. Just going down there made us feel adventurous. Made us feel divided. We sat on the barnyard railing and dared each other to touch the single-strand electric fence Grandad had newly installed to keep the horses in the orchard. An old hired hand had coaxed Katie to grab hold of it. He’d pointed out the birds sitting there, not feeling a thing. The trick was to put your whole hand around it and take hold. He did it, standing regularly, with a grin. So Katie did the same, clasped the wire and held on. As the current went through her, she stood as if she’d been planted in the ground. The man thought it was funny, Katie standing like that. We laughed too.
Grandad didn’t call to us, just suddenly appeared, got into the cab of the ramshackle truck and started it up. We scrambled over the side rails while he was cursing to himself, bitter, unlike his casual bovine profanity at milking time. “You’ll goddamn buck me, will you?” as he overshifted the gears. He had put on a striped shirt and a dark broadcloth coat that had once belonged to a suit. In the rearview mirror, we saw his eyes beneath the brim of his tweed schoolboy’s cap. Abruptly we knew he was a man, braced in the iron strength of his willfulness.
At first we lay among the hunks of dung-soiled straw. We rolled into the boards when the truck lurched forward, clutching each other. Then we looked and the house was out of sight; with it receded our mothers’ warning: “Don’t stand up, it isn’t safe. The way he drives.” We did, as soon as the house wasn’t watching us anymore. Grandad never told on us. We felt he didn’t notice. The wind was in our hair and through the crazed glass of the window we could watch Grandad, who seemed to control the vehicle as though it were some fiercely independent creature that battled with him. His head jolted violently as we bucked over the bricks of the road until we reached the smoother blacktop. Between the floorboards we could see the road’s black streaming under us; surrounded by the dung-crusted slats of the truck bed, we identified with the innumerable pigs and cattle, rams too, that had ridden in it to their final destination. The oaks that lined Summer Street dropped their branches low so that sometimes we could catch them, stinging and staining our hands with the blood of leaf veins. After we reached the back dirt roads again, we lay down to give ourselves up to the dust and thudding stones, daydreaming into the forever fleeing land.
At the mill, Grandad stomped up the ramp in his knee-length boots, a burlap sack of wheat loaded high on his squared shoulder like a young ram tied up for slaughter. We went behind him, more slowly, hesitant to enter the large frame building, dark beyond the entrance ramp, bare-looking without shutters or trim. Inside, the air glowed in a white powdery radiance that reflected off every surface. Down below, the miller stood, a ghostly figure, overseeing the grinding of the stones. We could feel their heave and shudder, on and on.
Grandad greeted the men standing in the yard and those inside with a nod of his head as he dropped the sack to the floor and kicked it right as though it had become the fit object of his contempt. Grandad had a reputation in the county for being still, even in his seventies, a strong man; and the farm was beautiful and they admired his family. We’d heard them, some of these same men, at threshing time when they ate their noontime dinner at our kitchen table, which had been opened up and boarded to sit twenty or more hired hands, Gram herself cooking, without a word to anyone, and us girls waiting on them. “Save that redheaded gal for me, Samuel,” one would say with a wink. “I’ll take me a black-eyed Susan anytime,” another joked; but with one eye out for Grandad, for the talk was serious and respectful when he was there with the women around. Now, with his cap on, tall and lean, and his expression proud and distant, he made us all uneasy, wondering what might be in him, what he might do.
He stomped out for another sack. The men eyed us. “There’s shorly a fire,” one said because of Celia’s and Anne’s hair, and they all gave a spurt of something like laughter, though it mixed with another thing we couldn’t name. But Grandad was coming back in, nodding and grinning at us, and it was as if we’d been set loose about the place. We watched the sacks of wheat or other grain descend on the conveyor and disappear below. On another belt the sacked flour ascended. Grandad handed each of us a penny for the gum machine, feeling good now, forgiving us abruptly and with as little reason as he’d had for conceiving his grudge. Or maybe his anger had never really had anything to do with us. When he went over to stand with the men, they offered him a bottle to drink from. After that we saw him drinking from it again and again.
An Amish boy stood off to one side with his father. The man’s face was frizzled with an untended beard, but it seemed that underneath, his bare face would have had an innocence identical to the boy’s. The boy was trying to conceal it, but we could tell he was watching us, wishing he could be with us. We felt exhilarated ourselves, with ourselves, in our blue jeans, tee-shirts, with the shiny thick hair of our family. Whenever we caught his eyes we’d smile, coaxing him.
Then his father went off a moment and Celia walked over. “Want some gum?” she asked, and held out her piece, which she had saved. The boy got red against his blue home-dyed shirt and stared blankly into the floor.
“Well, I don’t want it,” Celia said, and looking up at the father, who came then, she threw back her head with its lush fall of red-gold hair. He flushed too, looked as unsettled as the boy, his eyes blinking rapidly. Celia kept standing there, the gum offered, and they both stood, father and son, heads hanging before the round satiny piece of blue enamel. The wide brims of their hats cast a dark ellipse of shadow to hide their eyes. We pulled at Celia finally, to make her come away with us. “He’s not allowed to have it,” we whispered, reminding her, embarrassed over the fuss. The round of gum seemed unnatural, a wicked worldly thing resting on her delicate hand, and we saw—was it the first time?—that her nails were polished scarlet, long and crescent-shaped.
“All right,” Celia said at last. “But I’ll leave it here, in case you change your mind,” and she placed it on the oak railing where, grained with sifted flour as though bleached for effect, the wood gleamed so the gum seemed precious. In our relief, released from the stricken pair, we chased after Celia, pushing and running, and raced out onto the ramp, oblivious of Homer Snavely, who was coming up with a load of grain, until we were right on top of him and he was already fighting for his balance, then he gave up half jumping and let himself roll off the ramp onto the ground. We went rolling and skidding after him. We saw his set of teeth pop out of his mouth and sail away.
Grandad was standing at the top of the ramp. We could see him from where we lay in the dust. He didn’t say a word. We could scarcely breathe in the quiet that Grandad held in deliberate tension. Right then he could have come at us with a horsewhip and we would only have waited. He leaned over the railing and spouted a brilliant stream of amber into the dust near us, raised a flask and drank, then turned his head back toward the men, who must have waited too, knowing about him what everybody knew, and said sometimes even for us to hear: that he was as mean as a man could be who hadn’t yet been brought in for actual murder, though men might have died because of things he’d done. We could hear then the loud, relieving guffaws at whatever he said to the men above the tireless scraping of the stones. With his stick he reached down to help Homer Snavely pull himself to standing. There on the ground were the false teeth, grinning with embarrassment, it seemed. Grandad speared them on his stick and went swaggering inside, diving l
eft and right to balance them there. “Lookie what I catched,” he said. The men were stomping with the fun of it.
But we were uneasy still and slunk around the yard, feeling that something had really just begun more than finished with Grandad, who stood apart from the rest, and superior, until he started to drink whiskey with them, and then something stirred in him that still set him apart but was what excited them. Homer Snavely disappeared inside. “I wonder you didn’t swaller them,” somebody cackled.
Beyond the fence the Amish boy and his father were loading their buggy with tied-up sacks, neither of them looking away from their concentration on positioning the load, as if they wore blinders, like the standing, well-groomed horse. Everything about them was intentionally dark, even the buggy’s curtains, except the blue shirts—quite like the fierce blue of the boy’s blue eyes when he tilted back his hat and looked at Celia once, before he pulled up beside his father and took the reins. The heavy-spoked wheels creaked through the dust and the tussocks of grass bent and sprang back. In a while we heard the clip of the horse’s hooves, after they had disappeared and gone over the dirt to the paved road on the rise that led to Orsonville Flats.
“His hat was funny,” Katie said, and we giggled. Celia said, “I thought his eyes were fine.” And then she went inside and we got the same idea and ran after her, but taking care this time, going in at the side door. Even before we looked at the railing, we knew the gum would be gone, because we saw first, from the landing, the expression on Celia’s face, her calm acknowledgment. That was the first time we saw it in her, that sureness. “Celia’s sweet on a plain one,” we teased, trying to bring her back to us, make her blush and deny it.