“Oh.”
“They get grown mostly down in the San Luis Valley.” He glanced over at me once, then continued. “But some farmers around here grow a few fields, then send the harvest straight off to the potato chip makers.”
“I see.”
We kept the windows down for needed cooling, letting the air whip in. I could feel the output of plants landing heavily on my skin. And as we arrived, I could tell my efforts to stay neat had done little good. Dust covered the sleeves and bodice of my dress, and I could feel tangles twisted in my hair.
Martha and Hank greeted us with smiles and handshakes, as if dropping by unexpected weren’t unexpected at all. Their farm could have been a replica of ours. Inside the house, which had had a second story added for more bedrooms, they introduced me to their children. Sixteen-year-old Ruth wore a big shirt over denims, and her hair swung behind her in a long, rusty-colored pony-tail. Her eyes grew large as she looked me over. “Is that dress ready-made?” she asked.
It hadn’t occurred to me until then, but of course store-bought clothes might still be considered quite extraordinary out here. During the Depression, farm wives and children were still wearing chicken-feed-sack dresses and flour-sack underwear. I nodded to Ruth and said, “It’s my favorite,” but then I wondered if perhaps I should have worn something simpler.
“Oh, I can see why,” she replied, still looking me up and down.
Ruth’s thirteen-year-old sister Wanda rose from reading a book to be introduced to me. She had copper-colored hair the same shade as her freckles and thick, straight hawk brows that must have spent a lot of time in thought. The two boys, Hank Jr. and Chester, looked more like twins than brothers. “They’re only a year apart,” Martha explained. As I shook their hands, I noticed they had the same shade of brown eyes that ran in the blood of this family—lighter than mine—the color of brown eggshells.
After a polite exchange of how-do-you-do‘s, the boys headed back upstairs to finish a game of cards until dinner was served. Wanda took herself back between pages, but Ruth never left my side. Over dinner and dessert, she stared at me. She asked about the fabric of my dress, and later she asked to try on the opal ring I wore on my right hand, a gift from my mother.
In the kitchen, Martha started pulling out pots and pans, ladles and spoons, jars of spices. Ruth and I offered to help her, but she assigned us nothing but the table to set, and working together, we finished it in minutes. As we sat to fold the napkins, Martha kept moving about her kitchen with a certain ease of movement and steady purpose that let everyone around her know she had everything under control. Ray and Hank discussed farming business endlessly, and I overheard words and terms I’d never heard before, letting me know for certain just how out of my own element I was.
Beet pullers and feedlots. Fresnos and slips.
At last, Martha took a rest. She sat with me at the kitchen table while dinner baked in the oven. Ruth stayed with us, too, her chair scooted up flush with mine. When I told Martha I was not a cook, she offered to loan me recipe cards she kept in an old oak box, and she told me she knew a secret for perfect piecrust, if ever I wanted to know it. And she offered to pass on her “starter” for baking bread. I thanked her but didn’t say I had no wish to spend my one evening out wasting it in talk of nothing but the kitchen.
“How did your ancestors arrive here?” I asked her instead.
“Oh, well, that’s a story,” she said as she knotted her hands together on the tabletop. “Our grandfather came out here in 1870, one of the first to homestead in these parts. He was only nineteen at the time.”
Already she had me hooked. “Where did he come from? Why did he do it?”
Martha looked puzzled. “I guess I don’t truthfully know for certain why he did it. Most likely it was the lure of free land. For poor folks, owning land was the only way to get respectable,” she said with a smile. “Anyway, he came out from New York City’s Lower East Side, traveling by rail and by steamship and then by rail again all the way to Granada. From there he loaded a wagon and followed the Arkansas.”
“And he was alone?”
“At the beginning of the journey, yes.” She smiled and gazed as though remembering something pleasant. “I heard the story many times as a young girl. He met our grandmother, a pretty little thing of only seventeen, on the steamship and convinced her father that he would be a good husband. He was quite the smooth talker, I heard. They were married by the ship’s captain, and she finished the journey along with him.”
Martha went on to tell me that through tough times and often disappointing farming, her grandparents had built crude homes, then other homes, and stayed on. Martha had a gift for story-telling, like that of my mother. If only her brother shared the same gift.
“In the earliest days,” she told me, “farming wasn’t very successful without irrigation. They had to try to raise crops just on rainwater, which isn’t much. Then, beginning in the 1870s, the irrigation companies put in canals off the river, but the farmer still had to dig out his own ditches.” She sat back in her chair and pulled at a loose thread on the tablecloth. “I doubt any of us could work that hard nowadays.”
She studied my face now, but without a hint of hardness. “I keep a box of old photographs and papers in the attic. If you ever want to take a look, you’re most welcome.”
I nodded. “I have to say I find the history of the farm more interesting than present-day operations.”
Martha smiled; then, after a period of silence, she glanced over toward the divan at her brother. “When Daniel joined up, Ray decided to stay behind and run the farm.” She looked down at her hands. “It’s funny. They never fought over anything. And they never spoke of dividing up the land between them, either. Most brothers would have done that, you know.” She caught my eye for a moment, then looked back at her hands. “They always planned on running the farm together. When Daniel returned.”
Ruth was still right beside me, but now she looked away.
I said the useless words, “I’m sorry,” to Martha, although after my mother’s death, while I was still walking pure grief, those words had done nothing for me. I had wanted people to do something bold, take action, shout and rage, anything to express the magnitude of my loss. But I said the words, “I’m sorry,” to Martha because I was incapable of creating anything else.
Martha took a long breath. “Now that he’s gone ...” But by then, her air was gone, too.
I finished saying it for her. “Of the Singletons, now only the two of you remain.”
She looked up at me. “No longer.”
I puzzled, and then she smiled. “Now we have you.”
Later the two boys joined us at the table. They wanted to know everything about living in Denver. Did I go often to the cinema, was the capitol building really made of gold, what card games were played at the USO, and had I ever met the governor? When Martha excused herself, the oldest boy, Hank Jr., moved to my side. After he checked to make sure his father wasn’t listening, he whispered, “I want to tell you something, but it’s a secret.”
I crossed my heart. “Promise not to tell.”
“When I grow up, I don’t want to be a farmer. I want to live in the city like you did, and I want to work in one of those factories that make ships for the Navy.”
I touched his shoulder. This youngest generation had known nothing of a world without war. “Let’s hope the Navy doesn’t need warships by then.”
After dinner, Martha took me outside and showed me the new porch swing they had recently hung. “Let’s sit, Livvy,” she said.
But Ruth slipped down on the seat beside me before Martha had a chance. The boys stood across from me and thought up more questions for me to answer. As I continued to chat about the city life, Ruth inched her way closer to me. I could feel her studying the movements of my face, and I could feel her breath land on my shoulder, soft, like warm air without wind.
In the middle of our conversation, Ruth blurted out to her mo
ther, “I want to cut off my hair.” Then she touched one of the curls resting on my shoulder. “I want a bob, just like Livvy’s.”
And after that, I couldn’t make myself meet Martha’s eyes.
Five
I filled the next two days by cooking and cleaning. I waxed the wood flooring over and over all throughout the house until I got it as shiny as a new desktop. During the sunny afternoons, I washed clothes and linens and hung the wet pieces out to dry on the clothesline. One morning I asked Ray to show me how to be of more use around the farm, and he took me out to the barn, where he let me gather the fresh eggs from the chicken coops. He also offered to show me how to milk the cows, but I declined, too embarrassed to tell him I was fearful of those big, noisily chewing animals. The next morning, he showed me how to operate the cream separator. Along with the extra eggs, he took the cream stored in five-gallon cans into La Junta to sell. He gave the remaining skimmed milk to the hogs.
While the laundry dried outside, I wrote letters to Abby and Bea and then drove the truck to town to post them right away. I kept up with news of the war by way of La Junta’s station KOKO on Ray’s battery-run Philco radio and by reading the newspaper that came in the mail.
As the Allies slowly reclaimed Europe, more reports of Nazi atrocities against the Jews were beginning to come to light. Soviet soldiers had overrun the Polish death camp Majdanek in late July. They hadn’t found many prisoners but had found eight hundred thousand pairs of shoes. Throughout the war, occasionally I’d read articles, usually ones buried in the depths of the newspaper, relaying unbelievable reports of mass murder. Now the news came in of more discovered killing centers, and as I allowed myself to accept that some of the earlier reports might have been true after all, I felt the pages of this new history curl and recoil. I remember the moment I let myself at least partially believe. I remember the smell of bacon lingering in the kitchen after breakfast, the way the light came in softly through the curtains from the window, how it fell on the yellow cotton of my shirtdress. Everything around me stilled and quieted. The apple butter jar sitting open, breadcrumbs scattered about, and Ray’s hat off to one side on the table. As I loitered with little to do, perhaps some of the most dreadful events of human history were daily coming to light, each new report more gruesome than the ones before it.
The Allies and the Red Army slowly progressed. Unthinkable tales of mass graves and gas chambers and other evils still too horrendous to fathom for those of us living comfortably in our own country were slowly emerging. The press coverage was brief, however, and given the exaggeration of atrocities during World War I, an air of disbelief still prevailed. One evening I read a small article I’d found in the back of the news section of the Denver paper. It said that ten thousand Polish Jews had been killed daily; a million Hungarian Jews had been massacred. I remembered a vision that had stuck with me, the eight hundred thousand pairs of shoes.
I had to let the paper drop to my lap.
Ray looked up at me quizzically, so I relayed to him what I’d just read. And I told him about the shoes at Majdanek. “What do you suppose happened to the people who had been wearing all those pairs of shoes?” The numbers were staggering. “Could they all have been killed?”
But Ray looked unfazed. He only shrugged and went back to studying his folder of papers, obviously too concerned with pressing matters here on this farm to let the outside world bother him. Or was the thought of so much death simply too painful for him, especially because of Daniel’s death? Maybe he couldn’t let it sink in just yet.
I continued reading alone. I found out that thousands of Axis soldiers were being taken prisoner, many of them starved and sick, and some of them ending up in American POW camps, one of them in nearby Trinidad. The news reports were full of ruin in Europe, including hunger that most of us couldn’t imagine. In another article, I learned that the Dutch had been forced to eat their tulip bulbs just to survive. But with no servicemen around Wilson and surrounded by lush pastures and full fields, the only signs of warfare were the news reports on the radio, what I read in the newspapers, and occasional low-flying practice runs made by pilots from the base at La Junta. It often felt like the war wasn’t real, the way we had felt during the first months of the war, when the entire city of Denver seemed to deny the whole thing.
Back in December 1941, everyone in our posh neighborhood had still lit their houses with Christmas lights. But within a year, we were attending war bond rallies, learning what to do during air raids, sewing blackout curtains, even rationing gasoline and holding on to old tires. We saved our toothpaste tubes, tin cans, and fat. We were told that one pound of fat could be turned into a pound of black powder, and that the iron in one old tool could be converted into four hand grenades. Father had to turn over his spare tires and drive around on bald ones. He supported the war, but secretly he sometimes purchased black market gasoline so he could travel around the city as he wished. He wasn’t about to ride the streetcar, although many of the rest of us had begun to do so.
By the time the onion and bean harvest began on the farm two days later, I was aching for the city life again, even with its wartime restrictions. The first day of harvest, Ray tried to inform me about what to expect from the busiest season of the year. “Onions and beans got to be pulled by hand. The high school kids are back in school, and all the older boys are in the service,” he said. “We need help, and the government needs our food so bad, now they send in the workers.”
He sat longer and shuffled his hat about on the table. He kept glancing up at me as if waiting for a response or praise or something else, I didn’t know. He reminded me of those men classified as 4-F, those disappointed boys who couldn’t enlist because of bad vision or holes in their eardrums or some other problem. Treated a bit like freaks, they often went into civilian defense to play their part, anything to gain acceptance. Many of the male students left in college had told me they were asked regularly why they weren’t in the service. Ray was so like them, the way he boasted about the importance of farmers.
I groped for something to say. “The harvest must go on.”
Ray reached for his hat and started to rise from the table. “Things are sure going to get busy around here.”
Thank goodness, I thought.
During the day, the farm was different. The fields filled with Japanese workers from Camp Amache in nearby Granada. In the morning Ray took the sides down on the beet box so he could pick them up. They debarked from the truck in front of the house and made their way to the fields, where they worked until sundown.
I tried not to stare, but they were such a study in contrasts. As they arrived in the mornings or as they left at sundown, I found it difficult not to follow them from my kitchen window. Ranging in age from teenage to elderly, some of the younger ones dressed just as the students at the university had been dressing, with rolled-up denims the latest in fashion, and their hair styled in the most recent ‘dos. Many of the older women, however, dressed in long skirts and long-sleeved robes tied with a wide cloth belt, and they pinned their hair in a simple bun at the nape of the neck.
I tried to remember the Japanese Americans I’d seen in person before. Colorado was home to a small contingent of farmers of Japanese descent and even some city dwellers northeast of downtown. I remembered their dark coloring and short, compact statures, but my most vivid memory came from a photo I’d once seen, a photo of picture brides. Among the Issei, immigrant men in the U.S., it had been a common practice to send back to Japan for their wives. Young women who didn’t speak a word of English would arrive from the old country, and their future husbands would pick them out from the crowd using the photographs sent by members of their family. As I watched the older women, I wondered how many had come to the U.S. for an arranged marriage. And wasn‘tIabit like them? But Ray had decided to marry me knowing I was pregnant and without ever seeing a picture.
What surprised me most were not the interns’ differences in dress and appearance. What surpris
ed me was their impeccable demeanor. Despite their imprisonment, despite the fact that we were at war with the country of their ancestors, every one of the workers demonstrated the finest of manners. Every day they pulled the dry bean pods and shelled the beans. They pulled up fat onions out of the ground by hand and cropped the tops with sheep shears, grueling work to say the least. But as they boarded the trucks in the evening, even the oldest and most stooped workers still wore smiles on their faces, smiles that to my amazement seemed true.
After the first few days of harvest, I told Ray over breakfast, “Today I’d like to come and watch.”
He looked confused.
“To watch what you’re doing, to see what it is to harvest.”
Ray stopped eating. “I don’t understand. Everything’s going just fine.”
Now I stopped eating, too. “I won’t interfere. I just want to learn.”
He looked into his plate. “But it’s not needed.”
Obviously I had hurt him instead of flattered him by my interest. In the past, I had found most people more than willing to show off their skills and knowledge. I thought others enjoyed demonstrating what they knew, but not Ray. He didn’t want me to learn anything about farming firsthand, only through his infrequent and bland descriptions.
“Never mind,” I said and picked up my fork again. “I’m sorry I mentioned it.”
That night, after all the workers had left and Ray came in exhausted and dirty, he took me out beside the barn and showed me the collapsible wooden crates packed with fresh onions. He offered to drive me over to the place where the crates were stored for months at a time in adobe storage buildings. But I could tell he was only doing so to placate me, so I declined. And after that, although I’d been on the farm for only two weeks, I’d already decided to keep my distance from the business of farming.
The next day, I began work on the flower garden. I pulled up the old faded whirligigs, set them aside for repainting, and gathered up the colored stones that Ray’s mother had collected. As Ray drove the first truckload of onion crates away toward the storage buildings, I chopped up the deep-rooted weeds in the old flower garden and prepared the soil for bulbs. These things my mother had taught me. Always, she had liked the feel of dirt between her fingers, and of course the results of her efforts—blooming flowers. Even after she had hired on household help, she cared for the flower gardens herself, often taking us girls outside with her. Mother taught us how to break up the frost-hardened topsoil after winter, how to turn and mix the dirt beds in spring, how to plant seeds and bulbs, how to shape and prune the emerging new plants. It was one of the few times we were allowed to get dirty.
The Magic of Ordinary Days Page 5