A Wilder Rose: A Novel

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Really, I shouldn’t have been hurt by this silliness. I should have simply laughed and shrugged it off, since she was so obviously—and I think deliberately—missing the point. I wasn’t writing about Charles and Caroline: I had chosen those names to honor my grandparents, not to tell their story.

  But her point was something very different. She was letting me know, once again, that my fiction was less truthful, and hence less significant, than her true-life stories. And later, I heard some talk in town that she resented my use of a few fragments of “her” family story, although I had grown up hearing them. They were my family stories, too.

  Of course, town gossip always magnifies small disagreements, and I doubted that my mother—so circumspect, even secretive, about her private affairs—would publicly air what she would consider a family disagreement. Still, my disappointment in Hurricane’s sales had made me raw, and her undisguised disregard for my work was another turn of the screw. It was the same kind of thing that had made me so miserable when I was a child and she found fault with my efforts to help her. Do we ever outgrow those old childhood hurts, or do they gnaw and fester in our spirits the whole length of our lives?

  But of all the desperate losses of those dark, terrible months, there was one that hurt more than all the others put together. In February, on a day when the radio was full of bad news, the skies were an unforgiving gray, and the temperature barely climbed above zero, Mr. Bunting was hit by a car. Catharine was with me then; she found him crawling up to the house, covered in blood. He died later that day and we buried him on the hill, where he had loved to bark at the birds. His was a worse loss than any I had experienced since the loss of my child, and I couldn’t seem to get over it. There were moments I felt a kind of dull relief because he was gone: he was often muddy, frequently sick, and always running off. But any relief, if that’s what it was, was immediately smothered by a terrible longing for his gay, gallant, fearless little self. And then by an even more terrible loathing of myself, for my lack of tenderness, of love, of attention. If I had been more watchful, if I had taken better care of him, if I had loved him more—

  But that was wrong, just wrong. Perhaps I hadn’t been watchful enough, but I had loved him, loved him with a hard, fierce sweetness, as I would have loved my child. And he had loved me. He had run into my room every morning as I was dressing to lick my bare toes. He had snuggled in my lap every evening, as I read or played chess. Now he was gone, and it wasn’t just the little dog I mourned, but the loss of that love, mine and his. Would I ever love again? Would I dare? I couldn’t stop crying. For months, it seemed, I couldn’t stop crying—not just for Bunty but for all of it. For all I had lost, for the little dog, for the book, for Troub and Albania and our beautiful, vanished dream.

  After Bunting’s death, the days and weeks were unrelievedly dark. The final portion of the Hurricane advance arrived and was paid out in bills, and there was no more coming. Thinking to relieve the situation, my mother, who always said with a long sigh how much she hated to depend on me as her “sole source of support,” presented me with two money-saving schemes, little dramas of self-sacrifice that I could only see as tokens of martyrdom.

  The first involved cutting off her electricity. She proffered this sacrifice with the brave, playful reminder that she had managed perfectly well without it for most of her life and could manage perfectly well without it now. Cutting off the Rock House, she pointed out, would reduce my electric bill by half. (Never mind that her furnace wouldn’t run without it, not to mention the refrigerator and the water heater and the cistern pump.)

  “I really wouldn’t do that, Mama Bess,” I murmured evasively. “Let’s not be in a hurry—something is bound to turn up.” She was easily dissuaded, of course, and the conversation ended with my giving her a check for sixty dollars, which she took only on condition that I’d tell her if I needed it back. Two months later, the electricity at Rocky Ridge was cut off briefly, until I sold a story to the Saturday Evening Post and paid the overdue bill.

  Another, more drastic solution, I actually welcomed—at first. Mama Bess came to me with the idea of selling the Rock House and the Newell Forty. Mr. Lynn, who handled farm properties in the area, had told my father that he thought it would sell for seven thousand dollars. The parents could move back to the farmhouse, now that there was electricity and water and an automatic furnace, and they might be able to find someone who could live in the tenant house and do the farm chores and the yard work in trade for the rent. I could go, I could leave. I could escape to New York. I could travel again!

  But even as my heart leapt up with a kind of idiotic joy at the thought of getting away, it fell back again under the weight of knowing that the idea would come to nothing. This was an impossible time to list a farm property for sale. Nobody had the money to buy. The banks didn’t have the money to lend.

  When I pointed this out, my mother replied in a tone of great reasonableness, as if she had also thought about it, that if the house couldn’t be sold, it could certainly be rented. She and Papa could come back to the farmhouse and live with me, and we would save money and make money at the same time and be such good company for one another.

  I mumbled, again, that we really oughtn’t be hasty, that something was bound to turn up, and we should just stay where we were for the time being, in our own two comfortable houses.

  Get away—get away! Oh, if only I could! And if only my mother would stay in her own comfortable house, stop dropping in for “just a minute or two” and staying all afternoon, stop telephoning, stop interrupting. She wasn’t writing, she announced: that is, she hadn’t yet started the book she was calling her “Indian” book. She was at loose ends, with nothing to do and nowhere to go unless Papa drove her to town or a friend came to get her. She was lonely.

  I recognized loneliness because I was often lonely, and I felt that she was reaching out, trying to find or create an easier, less tense connection with me. But I was incapable of welcoming that connection, and not just because I resented her interruptions or the unappreciated work I did on her books. In those days, I heard a barb buried in every sentence, an expectation in every offer, a demand in every smiling invitation. She and I were like neighboring states with a long and problematic history, with shared and very porous boundaries, she constantly invading, I continually repelling. A part of me wanted to be closer to my mother, but if I were to allow her invasions, I would be overrun, smothered, swallowed up. If I were ever to pursue my own goals, I had to push her away. When I did, she felt rejected and abandoned and stepped up her demands. These periodic sallies and skirmishes intensified my despair about the situation in which I had been trapped, without hope of release, since I was a child. My sense of guilty obligation was born of those terrible days when I could never do what she asked fast enough or well enough to meet her expectations or her demands, yet I had to try and try again. Here I was at midlife, still trying to meet her expectations—and the trying was making me sick.

  I was reminded of this on the street in Mansfield one day not long after Roosevelt’s inauguration, when Mrs. Watson, who fancied herself something of a seer, looked at my mother’s palm and told her that she could always count on getting what she wanted. (Mrs. Watson had known my mother for more than thirty years. I doubted that she had discovered this quite obvious truth in her friend’s palm.)

  My mother was delighted. “I always have,” she replied with her sweetest little smile and looked down at her outstretched palm as if to get what she wanted, all she had to do was hold it out. I heard the complacency in her voice and understood that all my child and adult efforts to please her had come to this: that my mother could get whatever she wanted whenever she wanted it, and she knew it and was pleased. Perhaps not; perhaps she did not feel quite that self-confident. But that was what I heard at that moment. I wanted to be glad, to feel some generosity toward her—after all, who knew better than I how difficult her whole life had been
? But her sense of entitlement gnawed at me, when I thought of my own unrecognized efforts.

  The weather, which was simply apocalyptic, was making it even harder to work. The winter had been warm and dry, except for one mid-April blizzard. Spring was short and hot and dry. Summer was drier and hotter, with a furnace-like wind that exhausted me on the short walk out to the garden, which required constant watering. The newspapers said that the drought in the Midwest and on the Plains, now of two years’ standing, had broken a half-century record. At the end of June, the summer’s hay (normally harvested in late July) was cured, uncut, as it stood in the field, while the leaves of the young corn rolled up to protect the plant from moisture loss. Only a couple of hundred miles to the west, dust storms blanketed the land with black, billowing clouds of blown soil; caught on the winds, it fell on us, too.

  That month, I was regularly back at work, despite the awful, mind-numbing heat. George Bye wrote that Erskine Caldwell (the author of Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre) had contacted him to obtain an option for a film adaptation of Hurricane. Caldwell was working as a screenwriter for King Vidor at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and was responsible for pursuing possible stories. Bye offered a short-term option at seventy-five hundred dollars and authorized the rights to MGM for nine thousand dollars, with the fifteen-hundred-dollar difference to go to Caldwell.

  I was excited, elated, and hopeful, oh so hopeful. A movie would make up for so many disappointments, would endorse my hard work and give it recognition, would be a kind of redemption. When I imagined Hurricane on the screen, I thought of Katharine Hepburn, who was starring that year as Jo in Little Women. Hepburn would portray Caroline as a young woman with backbone, endurance, and faith in an unseen future. And the option money would pay my debts and set me free. It bothered me that the fifteen hundred dollars to Caldwell was a bribe (George Bye called it a finder’s fee, but I knew the difference). Nevertheless, I was willing to pay it—and more—if it meant that the book would become a movie.

  I wrote to George Bye immediately, telling him to make the deal if he could. But I might have saved my effort, for a couple of days later, I got a letter saying that the project had come to nothing. And still later, I learned that Vidor had left the studio at the same time that Caldwell had reached the end of his MGM contract, and their projects were shelved. Out of such small misses and miscues is history made—or unmade. I’m glad I didn’t know that then. I wanted the film, oh, yes, and very badly. But would I have wanted Erskine Caldwell’s adaptation? I remember Tobacco Road and think probably not.

  And then I thought of something else I wanted to do—something different, yet related. Years before, in the San Francisco Bulletin days, I had written a series of articles called “Soldiers of the Soil,” about farming in California’s Central Valley. Now that Hurricane had established me as a writer on Plains pioneers, I thought of doing an article on the dire situation of wheat farmers on the drought-stricken High Plains. I had been reading about their plight in the newspapers and seeing it in the context of Roosevelt’s Agricultural Adjustment Act, which was paying farmers to take their wheatland out of production. I proposed the idea to George Bye and he pitched it to the Saturday Evening Post. In mid-July, the Post commissioned it.

  After Lucille Murphy had returned from our drive to upstate New York the previous autumn, she had decided to give her marriage one more try. “I just don’t have the ruthlessness it takes to cut myself loose,” she told me ruefully. “At least, not now.” I asked Lucille to go with me to do the research for the Post article. I broached the subject the week after I heard from the Post, one night when she and Eddie had come over for a supper of fried chicken and fresh sweet corn.

  “It’ll be a two-week driving trip,” I said, “across Oklahoma and Kansas. I’m making a list of people I need to interview. We’ll see a lot of country,” I added, “although it’ll be hot. And dusty.”

  “Sounds nice, Rose,” Lucille said, tilting her head. “I’d like to, actually. Just us girls.” She glanced at her husband. “I’m sure Eddie can take care of himself while we’re gone. He’d rather have chow with the boys at the café than eat my cooking, anyhow.”

  “Oklahoma and Kansas?” Eddie hooted. “In this heat?” He was a short man, in his thirties and not bad looking but already going to belly. “That’s the damn stupidest idea I ever heard, Rose. Don’t you know what’s goin’ on out there, with them dust storms and all? If you gotta go, put it off until the weather ain’t so hot.”

  “I can’t,” I said, trying to be polite. “The Post wants the article for the September issue.” I turned to Lucille. “What do you think, Lucille? Are you game?”

  “Nothin’ doin’,” Eddie said flatly and reached for another piece of fried chicken. “Lucille’s got better sense.”

  That decided the matter. Lucille was in favor of doing anything Eddie didn’t want her to do.

  “Well, pooh on you, Eddie. You’re just an old spoilsport stick-in-the-mud.” She puffed out her pretty mouth. “Sure, Rose. I’ll go. We’ll share the driving. It’ll be swell fun.”

  It wasn’t swell fun. It was a grinding trip, a weary, scorching drive across drought-stricken, dust-blighted prairie, with stops in Tulsa, Ponca City, Tonkawa, Enid. North into Kansas, to Wichita and west to Dodge City, then north again to Hays and Salina, then back east to Kansas City and home. During the trip, I interviewed some two dozen people—farmers, ranchers, farm-association directors, grain-elevator operators, newspaper editors, county agents—and attended several farmers’ meetings.

  What I saw was deeply dispiriting. From eastern Oklahoma to western Kansas, there was no green to be seen anywhere. What had once been productive wheatland was swept clean by the wind, the soil drifted in brown, wind-sculpted dunes along fences and against buildings. This was not the country of the pioneers I had written about in Hurricane, where the wild grasses reached to the horizon in every direction, dancing to the wind that blew out of a clean, bright sky. The grass of fifty years ago was gone, the protective pelt of sod plowed under, the soil, millions of acres of it, sowed to wheat. When the rains stopped, the wheat died. The earth was left bare. What little moisture remained in the subsoil was baked out of it by the relentless sun. The unforgiving wind scraped it up and flung it into the air in boiling clouds two miles high, moving with a blinding force across the land, scouring paint from buildings, blasting the bark from trees, the flesh from animals.

  Dust, dirt, wind. “We know where the dust comes from by its colors,” one farmer’s wife told me, holding her apron across her face. “Red dirt blows in from eastern Oklahoma, yellow-orange comes up from Texas, black comes down from northern Kansas. Sometimes it’s all colors, mixed up together. Sometimes it turns the sun bright orange.” She shook her head, marveling at the memory. “I’ve even seen the sun with a rainbow around it. A rainbow, but no rain.”

  Lucille and I drove with the windows closed, but the car filled with dust and we had to tie handkerchiefs over our noses and mouths. When we stopped at a roadside café, empty because there was no traffic on the road, there was dust on the table and grit in our thin and unappetizing sandwiches. In our hotel rooms, the furniture was furred with dust and the floors were gritty underfoot.

  The dust wasn’t just ugly and unpleasant. It was deadly. In Dodge City, we saw people on the street wearing masks distributed by the Red Cross. In less than an hour, one man told me, a clean white mask would be black with dust. Prairie soil, he said, was rich in silica. It had the same effect on people’s lungs as coal dust on the lungs of miners. The Hays Daily News reported that in the previous three months, dust pneumonia had killed twenty; half of the victims were children. Cattle and sheep, their lungs filled with dirt, suffocated in the fields where they stood. They didn’t fall over: they were held upright by the dust that was blown around and over them.

  Businesses were paralyzed. The winter wheat crop was gone, and even when the flour mills could get gr
ain, they often had to send workers home because the blowing dust couldn’t be kept out of the flour. Hospitals delayed surgeries because the dust filtered into operating rooms. Foreclosure sales were postponed due to dust storms, and the cattle auctions and feedlots had gone out of business. Dunes drifted across the roads, and travelers had to stop and shovel their way through. A locomotive in Kansas was derailed when it ran into a dune newly drifted across the tracks. Roosevelt made a train trip through the Plains states; at one stop, a farmer held up a homemade sign: YOU GAVE US BEER. NOW GIVE US RAIN. The president shook his head. “Beer was the easy part,” he said. He was booed.

  I had attended political rallies before—in Louisiana, where Aunt E.J. was a supporter of the Socialist Eugene V. Debs; in New York, to a Communist meeting with Jack Reed—but I had never seen people in such a dark mood. They were angry. They were rebellious. Everything about Roosevelt’s New Deal agricultural schemes went against the grain of these yeoman farmers who had never taken a dime—or a dime’s worth of advice—from a government agency. Some of them were beginning to understand that their mistakes in land management were as responsible as the weather for the terrible fix they were in, and they could see the need to change their farming methods. They were ready to rotate crops, fallow the land, and abandon their sod-busting ways—whatever it took to make the land productive again.

  But the scorching heat, the wind, and the drifting dust had already drastically reduced the arable acreage. The farmers felt that Roosevelt’s scheme to pay them not to plant was as idiotic as his plan to fix the price of wheat. They feared a famine. They wanted a free market. They didn’t believe that the New Deal would help them cope with the dilemma that nature had pressed on them.