The Homestead

by Linda Byler

  So she was weak-kneed with relief to see the pink, portly pair seated cozily side by side on the high seat of the spring wagon, mopping their brows. The patient horse, as well fed as his owners, was already stretching out his neck for a nap.

  Sarah walked to the spring wagon, leaving Mary with Abby. “Hello,” she said, wondering.

  “Vy, hello.” They introduced themselves as Owen and Sylvia Klasserman, come over from “Chermany.” Neighbors to the east and closer than the Jenkinses. They had met their daughter on horseback.

  Sarah looked off behind the barn but saw no sign of Mose, then beckoned them to get down and come inside to visit.

  They were happy to do just that, grunting and grabbing the steel rimmed wheel to heave themselves off their high perch. Sylvia laughed as she alighted, said that age and extra weight took its toll in getting on and off that wagon these days.

  She had brought a German chocolate cake, a thing of magical flavor and texture. Sarah served it with cups of coffee, being careful to give Eli and Mary their share, their large eyes in awe of the wondrous cake.

  Sylvia’s round face looked crestfallen though as she looked around the primitive home. She tried to compliment the housekeeping, but through her eyes, accustomed to a house with papered walls, painted trim, and linoleum, it was a shame, a shame. The beautiful children. The tired yet beautiful mother. So little. These people had so little, and they had a pantry full and overflowing.

  Sylvia held the baby. Owen eyed her fondly. “We’ll come back often,” he promised. He knew his wife’s love of babies, never having had children of their own. But they enjoyed a loaded table, a good meal bringing them contentment.

  Sylvia chortled and chuckled, holding the baby with an obvious sense of glee. “Oh, but Mrs. Detweiler, if you’ll chust let me half the baby ven I come to visit, I will be the happiest voman on earth.”

  “Why, of course you must come. I often wish for the company of other women. I grew up in a close-knit family, with mothers and grandmothers and sisters and cousins nearby and everywhere.”

  “Where are you from?” Owen inquired, polishing off the last bit of cake, relishing even the last crumbs on his knife.

  “We are from Pennsylvania, from Lancaster County, where a group of our people have settled. We were farmers who fell on hard times. The Depression had hit us hard, and we could not make our yearly mortgage. So my husband, Mose, wanted to try homesteading on 320 acres here.”

  “You haven’t been here long, have you?”

  “No, not quite a year yet.”

  “I see.” Owen looked around at the misshapen logs, the slapdash chinking, which looked to be mostly clay from the creek bottom, and the peeling, rattling windows. Here was a winner, he thought. But he smiled at the children and asked about cattle, nodded his head in understanding when Sarah told him they had a start with a cow and two calves.

  “You should do all right in about five years,” Owen said.

  Sylvia nodded. “It takes awhile. We started on 160 acres and own about a thousand now. We’re running about 300 head of Black Angus cattle.”

  Sarah observed the buxom Sylvia and thought of her on a saddle, riding the range and throwing a rope. No, she decided, that that was an impossibility. “You are part of this operation?” she inquired politely.

  Sylvia threw up one hand; the other was clamped to the baby’s back. “Just the records. Only the bookkeeping, nothing else. Owen oversees the entire operation from horseback, though. He’s a good rider and has a good horse. Seems in this area, that’s what counts. A good horse.”

  “Do you raise any crops at all?” Sarah asked, curious.

  “We grow oats for the horses, and I hear there’s a few chaps trying winter wheat over the other side of Dorchester. I look for that crop to be taking aholt here, with sowing it in the fall and cutting it before the hot, dry weather begins. I think with tractors becoming more common, that will likely be the crop for profit, if any.”

  Talkative and amiable, the time flew till Mose came in for dinner, surprised to find a visitor’s team tied to the fence.

  He found the Klassermans very informative and helpful in the ways of the land. They agreed with the Jenkinses about the drought, about most things, actually. Politely they did not inquire about their income or lack of it. They just took their leave with polite goodbyes and promises to return.

  The minute they were perched on the high wagon seat, Sylvia was making plans for the old davenport in the parlor, the table on the back porch, the blankets in the cedar chest she would never use, the canned pickles and red beets, all those whole tomatoes canned in wide-mouth jars none of us enjoy. The faster Sylvia talked, the faster Owen nodded his head, bringing down the reins on the horse frequently until they jostled and bounced over the rutted road at a frolicsome speed.

  CHAPTER 13

  Hannah fed her horse, stabled him in the small barn along the back alley, stroked his face, and told him to be patient; the week would be over before they knew it. He snuffled around in his box of oats, chewed, and lowered his head as if to assure Hannah he was fine as long as he was fed.

  She turned to go outside when she heard voices coming from beside the barn, men walking along the back alley, carrying their lunch buckets, on their way to work, she supposed. She stepped back, allowing them to pass before making her way back to the house. That was the thing about living in town. There was no way you could avoid folks and their ordinary, everyday comings and goings, having to greet them amiably in spite of wanting to push them out of your way, just getting on with your life unhindered, the way they did out on the homestead.

  For that is what it was, a homestead. A place called home, no matter how primitive or how far they sank into the endless crevice called poverty. She missed the wide open space, the purity of the endless wind, the rustling of the grass—everything.

  But here she was, no closer to the one thing she yearned to do, which was rope cattle, learn to ride the plains with the Jenkins boys. She guessed if she ever wanted to do that, she had to stay alive, which meant she was stuck here in this dingy town to scrabble for food, like a possum looking for eggs in a henhouse.

  With a sigh, she went into the house, to find Doris in her housecoat, yawning and pouring herself a cup of coffee, her hair flattened from her night’s sleep. She seemed almost like a child, young and vulnerable, as if she needed care, someone to hold her and help her face the day that was dawning hot and bright and dusty.

  Doris whimpered a good morning, then sank into the rocking chair with her coffee, drawing an orange patterned afghan across her lap. “This dust. This endless dust. I declare, it will be the death of me.”

  Hannah stopped, looked at her, and could not think of a word to say. So she shrugged her shoulders and said she never heard of anyone dying from breathing dust, but she guessed you could if you wanted to. Doris threw her a tired glance, wrapped her hands around her mug of coffee, and sighed deeply.

  Hannah got out the cast-iron frying pan and scrambled eggs, made toast, and poured juice. She called Harry and told him breakfast was ready.

  They sat down together, Harry bent his head with his hands clasped on the table top to pray audibly, in his own words, thanking the Father for his food, may it bless their bodies and so forth, a practice so new and strange it made Hannah want to hide under the table in shame. She had never heard anyone pray out loud, much less using their own words. Dat would always take the lead, lowering his hands beneath the table, bowing his head in silence, each family member learning at a young age to pray their prayer in private. The Amish all did that. Hannah had never questioned this, but now, she needed to know why all praying was done in silence. She’d ask Mam.

  When his prayer was finished, Harry shoveled in his scrambled eggs, praised Hannah’s toast, and asked her how she’d done it.

  Hannah told him she’d fried it in the pan, with butter, the way they always did at home. Doris didn’t eat eggs, the toast was a bit greasy with butter, so in the futur
e, would she do hers dry?

  Hannah washed the dishes in a fury. She had no patience with this whining, sickly woman. Doris needed to get out and do something, anything, other than sitting at the hair-dresser or pitying herself. She needed about a half dozen kids to care for, that’s what.

  She wiped the cast-iron pan and flopped it into the cupboard, stalked past Doris without saying a word, slapped the door open that led into the store, and set to work.

  Customers came and went, spoke to Harry, picked up their purchases, the bell above the door ringing constantly. Hannah stayed in the back, by the low windows, arranging and rearranging, wiping down shelves until the water in her bucket turned black from the years-old dirt and dust.

  When she came to the jumble of ribbon, thread, elastic, snaps and buttons and braids, pins, needles and pincushions, she stood back with her hands on her hips and surveyed the dusty mess. Lifting her hand to wipe at the beads of perspiration forming on her brow, she left a smudge of gray dirt across her forehead.

  How could this man sell anything? Even if he was living in hard times, there was no sense in this. She marched up to the counter where he stood cleaning eggs from a wire basket, wiping each one methodically with a rag and stopping to examine an oversized lump of dirt stuck to a large brown one, before taking a fingernail to scratch it off, letting it fall on the countertop.

  Hannah swiped it to the floor. “You know, Harry, this place is so dirty that I can’t see how you stay in business, selling things that are covered in dust and soot and crap!” she said forcefully. “You blame Doris and her poor health, but I hope you know you don’t try, either.”

  Harry looked at her. “Well, well, what is this? Why do you say this?”

  “It’s offensive, that’s why. Trying to make a decent living is not easy for anyone right now, but the place could be more appealing if it was clean.”

  Harry put an egg in the carton, carefully, then said that if that’s how she found things, then go ahead, go right ahead and clean and change whatever she thought best.

  That was exactly what Hannah wanted to hear. She turned on her heel and marched smartly back to the hopeless jumble of sewing notions and began to blow the dust off each individual spool of ribbon and thread. She threw each one into a bin and was just starting to wipe down the shelves when Harry’s voice caught her attention.

  “She’s in the back with the fabric,” she heard him say.

  Hannah was standing on a wooden crate, reaching up as far as she could, when someone called her name. She turned to find Clay Jenkins looking at her, almost level with her height. Her knees turned weak and her mouth became dry as the air around her.

  “Hi.” He smiled his lazy, relaxed smile and melted Hannah’s resolve, just tipped it over like butter in a hot frying pan.

  She was so glad to see him she could not keep her lips from parting into a smile of true gladness, a welcoming he understood. “What are you doing in town?” she whispered.

  “Needed a bunch of staples.”

  “Staples?”

  “Yeah, the kind to fix a wire fence.”

  “Oh.” Flustered now, Hannah wasn’t sure where they were kept. She looked past him as if to go around him and show him, wanting to impress him with her expertise as a salesperson.

  “Hannah.”

  She looked at him.

  He reached out a hand, touched her cheek where a smudge of gray dust had smeared across it. “You think you might need a ride home on Saturday afternoon?”

  “I rode Pete here.”

  His eyebrows lifted and then settled back down. “So I can’t give you a lift, then?”

  “Not in the truck. Dat doesn’t allow me to ride in one.”

  “If I came with the buckboard?”

  “Buckboard?”

  “You call it a spring wagon.”

  “Oh. Well, no, not if I have Pete. No. Guess it won’t work.”

  “What about the food they give you as wages?”

  “I’ll strap it on, somehow. Pete is just like a pack mule.” She smiled to assure him she’d be fine. She wanted him to leave her alone; at the same time, she wanted him to stay.

  “Can you have off for an hour or so? We can go to the café and get a soda or something.”

  Immediately, the specter of the red, brassy Bess filled her head, and she lifted her startled eyes to Clay’s achingly blue ones. “I can’t. Harry needs me here to finish this.”

  “Do you mind if I ask him?”

  “No, no. Don’t ask. That’s fine. I’m not hungry. Or thirsty.”

  He touched her shoulder. “Hannah, that’s not why I asked you to go. I want to talk to you. Just sit across a table and look at you and listen to what you have to say.”

  “Clay, I can’t be seen with you. Not here in town. My father will never allow us to …” She stopped.

  “I didn’t ask you to marry me, just to have a soda.”

  Humiliation and anger boiled up, turning her face dark and staining it a deep color of shame. “Clay Jenkins, you stop that. You just stop saying things like that, making me feel like a pathetic idiot. Leave me alone. Just get out of this store and don’t come back. You have no right to talk to me like that.”

  And then, after that forceful speech that should have turned him on his heel and blown him out the door and down the street, he reached out and cupped her chin in his hand, smiled that smile that took all the strength from her legs, and said, quiet and low, but not in a whisper, “I’ll see you around, Hannah.”

  He took his good old time leaving too, stopping at the front counter and talking to Harry while he cleaned that disgusting chicken dirt off those eggs.

  The whole encounter was too humiliating. Hannah attacked the shelves with so much energy she knocked down five bolts of fabric that landed on her bucket of filthy water, almost upsetting it. By this time, Hannah declared it was one hundred degrees in the filthy store! She was already worn out and the day still stretched out like a long summer’s drought.

  He didn’t have to leave so soon. She wanted him to stay so they could have an ordinary conversation the way normal people do. She wanted to talk about horses and roping cows, things that interested her. She didn’t want him touching her cheek or her shoulder. Not her chin either, talking to her as if she was as old as Eli.

  If this didn’t stop, her future roping cows was fast going down the drain. She couldn’t learn to rope and ride with all three of those boys if this was how things were going.

  All week that same dark cloud called Clay Jenkins hung over her head, putting her in a prickly state of mind. The one good thing that came from his visit was her never-ending energy, banging and lifting, arranging articles in eye-catching displays and placing the new signs she made beside them. Customers began to notice and comment about Mr. Rocher’s new arrangements. Old spools of trim and braid, dusted off and placed in a wicker basket with lace and yarn sported a sign that read, “Special 10¢,” sat in the middle of the aisle on a walnut end table. Hannah dug out bolts of cloth that had been buried beneath more popular patterns. She cleaned and displayed them by draping a corner of the fabric loosely over the bolt so that the women could touch it and run it between their fingers to examine the texture more closely.

  Talk began to flow. Beth Apent told Bess at the café, and Bess told Ruth Jones, who had come in for a waffle with chicken gravy. Harriet Ehrlichman sat on a barstool and listened as Bess told her what she’d heard about Harry Rocher’s store. Harriet told Sylvia Klasserman when she came into town for some chicken feed.

  Sylvia clapped her hands and said she knew Hannah and had been out to see her family. Then she lowered her voice and said it was pitiful, just pitiful the way that poor family lived. She held her hand to the side of her mouth and told Harriet how they’d traveled the whole way from Ohio—or was it Pennsylvania? Anyway, they didn’t have a cent. That Harry likely paid her in peanuts, old tight-fisted thing. And that dusty wife of his was enough to drive you straight up a wall, not that it
would be an easy feat, at her size. Harriet chuckled along with Sylvia and said they’d go down to the store next time Sylvia came to town.

  On Saturday, the temperature shot up to 105 degrees, and the wind stilled until it became unbearably hot. Harry worried about Hannah riding home, but she assured him she’d wait until later in the day to start out, after the temperature had cooled to a more comfortable level.

  He taught her how to run the cash register, so it got alarmingly late, well past six o’clock, before she had gathered all her provisions into a gunny sack and slung it across Pete’s rump, well-tethered to the saddle that Pete was now proudly wearing. Harry allowed her to use it if she would always return it on Monday morning.

  So Hannah set off for home, eyeing the sun’s descent, planning to push Pete to arrive home before nightfall.

  She was glad to be away from the buildings that seemed to stifle the breath from her. Away from the untidy lots filled with patches of red root and thistle, broken tin cans, and all kinds of refuse, just an accumulation of stuff people pitched out of moving automobiles or off horses hitched to faded old buckboards—and anything that carried folks to town.

  Someone had thrown a feed sack filled with half-starved mewling kittens on the doorstep of Harry’s store, which made Doris wrinkle her nose and call them rats. So Harry left them in the weedy, overgrown lot as well, saying the townkids would either rescue them or get rid of them, one or the other.

  Hannah would have loved to take a cat home for Mary, but they could barely feed themselves, let alone a cat. Someday, she would bring a full-grown cat home, a good mouser, one that was self-sufficient, the way their barn cats had been back home.

  Pete’s head nodded, his heavy mane fell on either side of his neck, cream colored, thick and dusty, the way the top of a horse’s neck always was. She rode comfortably, her bare feet resting on the wooden stirrups, heels down, the way the Jenkins boys had told her. She sat straight, the reins held low, but not loose. They had told her to do that too.

  The heat hung over the flat land, like an oven that had been turned off but still retained the radiance of the coils in Doris’s electric stove. The grass hung limp, baked, and defeated. The road stretched before her, the yellow brown of the dirt cracked in long, jagged tears where the ground had become steadily parched, drawing together, packed down and covered with dust.