This had to be an aberration, a test, they all said. An accident, a hailstorm, is a presence. Something happens. Drought, like a slowly dying marriage, is only a growing absence, and it can take a long time to believe.
They waited.
You want to hope. It can’t stay like this, they said as the tops of the wheat turned brown and fell off; as they dipped rags in an inch or so of rusty pail water to plaster over their faces at night so they could breathe. It can’t.
They said it in 1917, 1918. And then the summer of 1919 arrived, and it was as if a face of pure malevolence turned itself full upon all those town kids from Minnesota and Wisconsin and Illinois. The sun beat down on them. The wind chiseled at them and blew their fields into great clouds of dust that rolled away like breakers. A purple cloud formed on the horizon, moved toward them slowly. Slowly it moved over their heads, darkening the sun. Slowly it moved on and away, leaving a few drops of moisture or none. And then the cloudless idiot sky again.
On a July day in 1919, a traveling preacher drove into Cut Bank in a sheepherder’s wagon and stopped in front of the Metropolitan Hotel. His pink and watery eyes looked out from a face the color of old cowhide. A silver shock of hair fell over his forehead. He wore a tall black hat with an eagle feather in the band. His bony horse leaned unmoving into the traces, head bowed to the heat.
The preacher erected a dusty umbrella over his head and sat for a few hours on the wagon seat, reading a small thumbed Bible and paring his ragged fingernails. Sometimes he spoke briefly to himself, nodded in polite agreement.
When the white sun was directly overhead, he collapsed the umbrella, wiped off his forehead with a piece of tattered gingham, and stood. He drew himself up to his full lean height and began to shout in a shockingly melodic voice. He shouted about the day of judgment, the invasions of locusts, the trials of Job, and the devil’s due. About valleys of darkness and pinnacles of redemption and the stubbornness and blindness of sinners in the face of all the clear signs.
He pointed a knobbed finger at the vengeful sun, then stopped to cough the dust out of his throat.
Businesses along Main had shuttered their windows against the sun and the dust and the hot-grease sound of grasshoppers, and when the traveling preacher stopped yelling, the town had no human voices. The cook at the Metropolitan threw a pail of slop out the side door and made a weary, batting-away motion at the preacher, who kissed his frayed Bible and steered his horse into a scant patch of shade.
The town baked. The prairie beyond quavered lakelike in the heat. In another month, most of the last of the beaten ones would arrive in town with the clothes on their backs, a few tools, their old faces. In the corners of the wagons would be outlandish remnants of other lives, what they’d had and hoped for—a hand-painted soup tureen, a lace wedding veil, a book. To Violet on the occasion of her high school graduation, from Aunt Mary. June 1904. Violet, aged thirty-two, is now an old woman on a buckboard seat.
By August, some of them would be begging for food, for a roof against the sun while they figured out how to leave this hell for good. But it was still July. There was the slimmest chance of rain. Everyone waited, moving in a trance.
The town pulled itself in to its bones. Shrunken wooden doors ticked, ticked in the harrying breeze. This waterless world? It was gravel through a child’s listless fingers; food turned to flour in the mouth; an inch of drinking water with the metal aftertaste of blood; clothes gummy with unrinsed soap; teeth grinding sand; dull hair, dull fur; the wheezing of an old horse that would one day forget to draw the next breath.
Two figures emerge from the rippling air at the far end of Main. Two bent men leading horses with sagging heads and bladed flanks. One of the horses carries a few bales of miserable overpriced hay, just off the train from Minnesota.
The men draw closer. T.T. Wilkins and Skiff Norgaard. They are young men who look older than their fathers back in Wisconsin. T.T. is thin and dark, with a flamboyant mustache and a beetled brow. Skiff is weathered Scandinavian, his eyes too blue for the harsh sun. Everything about him looks blistered.
They live with their families on adjacent half sections east of town. Four days ago, T.T. lost a four-year-old child to diphtheria. The other child, the two-year-old, has a fever.
T.T. and Skiff led these same bony horses, this morning, down the side of the rim to the river, which is only inches deep and beginning to pool. A stockman they know sets nets. He pulls the nets every morning, dumping suckers and goldeneye on shore. Mostly suckers. Then he rides back to his house on a tall spotted horse, never glancing at the people who wait up above.
Dry-land farmers, broke honyockers like Skiff and T.T., wait until the rancher is out of sight. Then they crawl down the long ridge on horses, in wagons, on foot—a half dozen or more men a day—to pick up the stockman’s already stinking fish, jam them into already drying burlap sacks, and take them home to be ground, canned, eaten. Because there is nothing much else by then.
The preacher begins to shout. The grasshoppers crackle and hiss. The breeze stirs up columns of dust that skitter down the street like dervishes.
Skiff and T.T. raise their heads in tired curiosity at the black, hatted figure on the wagon. They draw closer and begin to hear what he is saying.
“Lord God,” the preacher screams in his boy’s voice. “Where are you?” Then he shouts something about the dark fires that burn a thousand times hotter than the noon sun. “Sinners!” he shrieks. “The day is at hand! Ignore not the signs! Cast off your human folly and avariciousness. A man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth. Therein lies ruin. Turn your face from the blandishments of the devil before it is too late!”
Still shouting, the preacher eyes the two men walking toward him with their bent sick horses carrying charred-looking slough grass. They stare back at him. T.T. Wilkins brushes his hand over his eyes to clear away the grit so that he can see the man more clearly.
They might have kept walking, T.T. and Skiff. They might have been able to ignore the raver in black. But as T.T.’s hand came to his face, the smell of putrid fish settled on him and made him gag, the way the feel of his little daughter’s cooling feet had made him gag. He had tried one day to feed her a mash of the warm fish and, because he was her father and trying to help her, she had let it sit for a moment on her unmoving tongue before tipping her head so it would fall out. His bright-eyed girl, who hadn’t asked to be born and had looked so engulfed at the end.
He turns to Skiff. As one, they drop the lead ropes on their hay-heavy horses. The horses sink their heads. As one, T.T. and Skiff walk up to the preacher and they pull him off the wagon. And then they beat him until he doesn’t move.
They work speechlessly, kicking ribs, breaking an arm, pounding the head onto the baked dirt of the street, splitting skin to release the bright blood.
At the finish, he lies sprawled like a broken crow, collecting flies. And there is a stretch of time when nothing about that changes. No one comes out of a building. Nothing on the man moves, not even the blood. He lies black and crumpled in that halted place, looking like his own pronouncement.
Oh, those years! The war in Europe, the killer influenza, seemed nothing to compare to the absence of water. Clouds of grasshoppers came that blotted out the sun. Talc on your tongue, your teeth. The world turned to ash. Even the hoppers were parched. They followed the moisture a working man left in the air, his trail of sweat.
One farmer over east was targeted by a locust cloud as he furiously harvested the crisp remnants of a crop of oats. The invisible spray of his sweat drew them whirring and clacking, and they reeled the moisture into themselves and landed all over him, already chewing.
They descended on him and ate his shirt off. Everything they could get to. The collar, the sleeves, the sides—all but two strips beneath the heavy denim of his coverall straps. They chewed the hair on his head, the finer hairs inside his ears. They crawled bony inside his overalls, and they popped and
jumped and chewed as he stumbled, shrieking, back to his shack, arms bare, neck bare, raped.
In 1915, the first year the rains stayed away, Jerry and Vivian moved to town. They had proved up—the homesteads were theirs—but their farming was a bust, even before the drought. Rain at the wrong time. Two demolishing hailstorms in two successive years, just before they would have cut their crops. Lack of farm machinery and the necessity of cumbersome sharing arrangements with those who had it. Their essential ignorance about all that was agrarian, and then the arrival of one child and then another.
Vivian’s brother George married Emily Mainwaring, the mother of the girl who cut off the cat’s tail, and they moved to Seattle, where George got a job as a printer.
Jerry got a clerk’s job in the Cut Bank post office and decided to go into real estate. They moved into town to wait out the worst.
By 1917, with the drought and the grasshoppers and worms, they couldn’t even get anyone to lease their adjoining homesteads. The shacks of Jerry and Vivian and George—so new and audacious seven years before—stood neglected on the parched prairie, strips of newspaper curling off the inside walls.
As the moisture went away and failed to come back, a great slowing began. The days began to blur, each one more like the one before. Those who stayed walked more slowly. The animals walked more slowly, and some of them lay down on the ground. The stalks of wheat and oats bent over, then lay on the ground. The air hissed.
Vivian pulled aside the curtain and saw T.T. Wilkins and Skiff Norgaard walk past in the heat, stately as a dream, leading their two old horses. One had a few bales of bad hay on its back. The other had hay and a man in black, slung like a sack of grain so that his arms dangled off one side, his feet off the other. His trousers had ridden up, and the exposed leg between pant and boot was maggot white.
They moved slowly, the footsteps of the men and horses puffing up clouds of dust. They looked calm. T.T. had a stain on his shirt. The man in black raised a bloody face, dropped it again.
Was that what made her sure they must leave: the sight of that? Or the harrying wind that was coming up again? Was it the whimpering of her two small flaming-cheeked children in the heat and stillness? Or the news about the Wilkins children? The prospect of bringing more children into a place so singed?
Low voices that night, her own and Jerry’s. They talk about Seattle. About some night work Jerry might get at the railyard to begin to save money for a move. Their voices are papery in the dark. There is decision and relief in those voices.
They will go to another place. They have done this, and now they will do it no more. They will go west again, to Seattle, as far as they can go. Rain. Taxis. Babies in a city park.
It is time. This country is not what it seemed. This country is a fraud. It blows away before your eyes.
6
ON AN autumn evening in 1918, just before the end of the Great War, Mattie Malone began her serious dying. A crisp evening that smelled of wood smoke. Darkening skies and the sound of red leaves clattering in a small breeze.
After supper, as she sipped tea with Daisy Lou, her hand fluttered across her chest. Her heart felt squeezed, as it had so many times before, but there was something more this time. Some feeling of numbness, though it was not on the surface of the skin but far inside her. A deep numbness creeping upward.
She anticipated her next day in bed. She lectured herself. You must take care of yourself, Mattie, she thought gratefully. No arguing! She was a child ordered back to a cool-sheeted bed.
When she spoke to Daisy Lou, her voice slurred a little. Everything about her—her voice, her movements, the tracks of her eyes—slurred a little. This was new.
“A heart attack?” Daisy Lou inquired solicitously. Mattie was unsteady on her feet. Her toe stubbed the bottom stair. Her face was pale, and she was docile as a tired child when Daisy dressed her for bed.
“Best make the pies early tomorrow,” Mattie said very slowly. “And watch the meringue. You know you and meringue.”
Those were the last casual words Mattie ever said to her daughter or anyone else. A half hour later, Daisy Lou heard a loud thunk and ran down the hall, to find her mother curled in on herself, silent, on the floor.
Now everything changed. When her mother was stricken, it was, to Daisy Lou, like the dismantling of a tableau vivant. She realized she had felt for some time like the frozen explorer scanning the horizon. And now the curtain was drawn closed and everyone in the tableau was moving, scurrying back into life.
The presence of a crisis made her realize that a kind of timelessness, not unpleasant, had infused her for years; that she had stopped expecting major change in herself or anyone around her. Her mother would always be mildly ill. There would always be a war on some far continent that took all the young men, thus obviating the need for questions of marriage and romantic alliance. Her fame would always be waiting at a fixed distance from a fixed present.
But now the present had become unfixed. The trance was over. The war was over. Her mother lay in bed, beginning to die. Men walked the streets, some with missing limbs. Hearses carried the victims of influenza. Some of them had literally toppled in their tracks.
Daisy woke up and darted her head around and felt panic. A tooth began to trouble her. It was linked to all this somehow—that urgent throbbing on the side of her face, as if someone had yelled in her ear. She felt assaulted and without information.
Virginia Winterbourne, Daisy’s star student, was now eighteen years old and had the new look that a number of girls were putting on, and a slangy way of talking. She had become quite wild since her father died, and Daisy was afraid she would become common as well. Virginia’s hair was tied up to look bobbed. Her skirts were short enough to show most of her high boots. And she did have a reckless manner.
Daisy knew that Virginia had a herd of friends that she jumped into as soon as she stepped out of doors. She could almost hear them milling around outside, breathing like dainty animals, waiting for Virginia to join them. All of them were young and pretty and slangy like Virginia.
Sometimes a young man came by in a motorcar to pick up Virginia after her lesson. Daisy straightened her sheet music and watched through the lace curtains as they roared away. She thought then about words and phrases Virginia had let drop. Words like B.F., which stood for best friend. Entire plots of moving pictures. Which actresses she loved, which leading men. “There were a lot of white kisses in it,” she said about a new picture show. “And a few red kisses too!”
White kisses. Red kisses. Daisy Lou turned the terms over in her mind and wondered what it must be like to say the words so blithely.
The most unsettling aspect of Virginia Winterbourne, however, was that she had developed a beautiful voice. Encased in that flighty young person was a singing voice that cracked your heart. It was a soprano, with a husky undertone that suggested recent weeping or shouting, though, of course, she had done neither and tended to wear an insipidly cheerful look on her face most of the time.
Virginia had only to open her mouth and out came that voice, high and rich and true, beautifully inflected, as confident as the lope of a young athlete.
Hearing it, Daisy felt anger at the mismatches of fortune, at how this voice had mistakenly inhabited the wrong instrument, one that didn’t deserve it, didn’t keep itself in tune; didn’t try. She thought of Virginia’s voice as a lovely animal, a lioness, forced to jump hoops in a fly-by-night circus.
At least she, Daisy, could try to make the instrument, the conveyance, more worthy. So she was hard on her student. Drilled her. Criticized her attacks and made her sing arpeggios over and over.
She would show Virginia the proper way to fold her hands while singing, and the girl—lanky, careless, good-natured, heedless—couldn’t seem to do it in a way that didn’t look like a simper, an affectation. She seemed to mock her teacher in the act of imitating her.
This made Daisy Lou furious. You throw away your gift! That’s what she shout
ed inside. Outside, she tightened her mouth and recited her directions again or sang a phrase slowly, methodically, for Virginia. Giving it its full articulation and importance. Her voice wobbled at the edges.
Like this, Daisy Lou would instruct. Place your hands like this, your chin tilted, so and thus. And Virginia would try again and burst out laughing, and then an auto would honk and the young man would be out there to take her back to her group—“my group” she said to Daisy—and they would both be relieved the hour was up.
The auto chugs loudly down the street. Daisy Lou impatiently straightens the sheet music, her clothes. She brushes a crumb off her skirt as if it has attacked her. She draws her hand across her damp forehead and takes a spoonful or two of Electric Bitters for her nerves before she goes to tend her mother.
The voice won’t leave. It stays in the room, high in the room, a red and unblinking bird.
Mattie’s hair turned white by leaps. Each day, it seemed, another stripe of white appeared. She wanted it loose. She wanted it unpinned. She asked for a summer straw hat that had belonged to her husband, Franklin, and she kept it next to her on the white bedspread.
Now it had been six years since his death. She was aging rapidly beyond him, becoming his older sister, his mother, his white-haired grandmother. He lagged further and further behind, a boy kicking up gravel.
For two weeks after her stroke, Mattie did not speak. Then some words began to come, but they were very slow and in a deep register. She seemed to search for them, so that by the time she arrived at the point of utterance, anything she said took on weight and importance.
Before, she had been a talker. Even to herself. You must take care of yourself, Mattie, you must take a rest, she would tell herself when she had heart attacks and stomach attacks. She talked to the cat and the caged canary. She talked to herself about daily chores, fidgety details. She talked like fingers picking at nothing.
One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 6