Heartland

by Sarah Smarsh

  That night, I was lying in my bed in a big house I had recently bought. It was so beautiful—a huge, thoughtfully built structure with vaulted cedar ceilings in the great room, which alone had more square footage than most places I’d lived. It sat on a forested hill and had wraparound windows with a western view of the Kansas sky and my nice college town.

  I was a young professor. I had worked so hard and fast that by my late twenties I had already reached the top of my American climb from childhood trailers and farmhouses to waiting tables to college degrees to unfulfilling but good jobs to, finally, work in which I made a decent salary for my knowledge and creative passion. I had remained partnered with my high school boyfriend all those years, even though he had never developed physical desire for me—a situation that was painful at the time but that I now see served my intentions perfectly. To ensure that nothing knocked me off my path to a more stable life, I had sacrificed even more than I realized.

  When I’d gotten the tenure-track job at a small university, I called Dad from the porch of my first, modest house.

  “You’ve given 110 percent your whole life,” he said. “From now on you can give 70 percent and it will still be better than most people.”

  He knew that I would never stop working hard, though. It was deep in me, deeper than religion, to strive. But what I’d strived for, that amorphous goal I’d set as a child—to break the painful cycles I’d been handed by my family before I had any child of my own—had been reached.

  Perhaps sensing this, though we’d never discussed it, around that time my mother surprised me with a toy xylophone, its gift tag marked in her elegant script: “from Grandma Jeannie,” “to future grandchild.” I put it in a storage tub with the dresses she had sewn me when I was a baby. I wrote on the lid BABY, then paused with the marker and added a question mark. BABY?

  When I sold my first place and bought the next one, that dream house on a hill, I put the tub in a closet and got to work on renovations and repairs.

  I loved the place for the strength in it. It had spent forty years on a hill, and its foundation hadn’t slid an inch. But once I fixed it up with my dad’s help and guidance, I quickly became uncomfortable with how other people saw it and what they thought it meant. Affluent people gasped when they walked in and saw the cedar beams, the big windows, and the treetop view. I had gotten it for a steal, but the fact was that I somehow lived in one of the most beautiful houses worldly people had ever seen. They wanted it for themselves.

  It was the first time I’d ever had a material possession that inspired envy in others. I hated how it felt. To alleviate their fantasy that it was a paradise there, I’d point out how hard it was to clean and mow the whole place myself, how strenuously we had worked to refinish the ceilings. To relieve their confusion about how I afforded it, I’d tell them the purchase price, well below what humble little houses were going for.

  The issue was that I needed to square where I was with the story about where I came from—a seemingly great distance to reconcile.

  I was lying there in my bed, and suddenly I sensed you in the room. It was the same presence with whom I’d spoken for so many years but closer and more specific, like a real person. I closed my eyes and saw you for the first time as a clearly defined image—a child’s form. You didn’t look like me, but I knew who you were. And I knew why you were there: to say goodbye.

  You were the poor child I would never have—not because I would never have a child but because I was no longer poor.

  Until then, my transition into a life so different from the one I began with was still tenuous, and thus you remained as a flicker—a would-be child born into poverty—even after I got a graduate degree or my first salaried job. At those moments I was still “poor” by a lot of people’s standards. But that title of “professor,” that beautiful house on a hill—I could no longer think of myself as a sunburned toddler in a hot trailer.

  I could still have a child, so far as I knew, but I understood that you would no longer be waiting to enter me. If I were to become pregnant from that moment on, it would be a different soul, a different person. I would keep the storage tub marked BABY? with the gift inside from my mother to a future child. That child would never come from where I did, though, because my surroundings and I had so thoroughly changed. A cycle had been broken, and the place it tore was between me and you.

  I felt you leave like a soul that had waited around in my room for a thousand years. Thank God, but how it hurt.

  I had done what I set out to do, and I was glad. I made a decision at a young age and followed through with ruthless conviction. I kept you at arm’s length so long that the window for physical connection passed.

  I cried in my bed. I cried so hard that the pillowcase looked like the ones beneath my head when I was a child—wet orbs, cold against my cheek. That I couldn’t have you meant I’d left where I was from and who I once was in irreversible ways, no matter where I chose to live or how I did it.

  I cried to mourn a loss in success, then. I was so grateful to have known you and to feel you leaving that I cried from amazement, too.

  That night, I felt the separation from you in my bones—the physical you that would never exist. But the invisible connection that had existed all along, prior to that night, still exists, which is why I can talk to you now.

  You will never feel the Kansas wind in your hair, August, and for that I am not glad. But you will never have to fight like my family did. For that I am grateful.

  You never needed a world to respect you. Your worth was unto itself. Betty was right: A penny is a penny.

  Jeannie used to hint at that same gulf between my value and the way I’d be appraised, even in those years when she was angry and cruel. If a high school teacher picked on me for who my family was, Mom would raise her eyebrows just a bit, as if to say that woman’s opinion was hardly worth getting ruffled over.

  “She senses greatness,” Mom would say, as though that were the final verdict.

  An august thing is impressive and dignified, and beneath my mother’s pain she saw me and perhaps herself just that way. Maybe it was that undercurrent in her, subconsciously felt if rarely evidenced, that allowed me to quiet the world and hear you speak.

  You weren’t my daughter, of course, but my highest self—less a guardian angel than my own power emanating, necessarily disembodied from a body and mind I had been told by society had little worth.

  “Stop breeding,” society had said about my people.

  I laughed recently when I realized that’s exactly what I did but for reasons precisely opposite their hateful ones. I listened to a different voice.

  You are priceless, the voice said. It was my voice, and it was yours.

  I heard you, August.

  My life’s work was to be heard, and the poor young mother will have a hard row at that. No child of mine would ever have to do what Dorothy, Betty, Jeannie, or I did. Or what Teresa or so many poor women from different places did. I loved us both so much that I made sure you were conceived only in my mind. A little sad for the woman in me, but great for the god in you.

  I realized recently that if I had given physical birth to you at the age Jeannie gave birth to me or Betty gave birth to Jeannie, your first election as a voter would have been in 2016. That was another big turning point in America, like when Jeannie cast her first vote for Carter in 1980 and I cast mine for Bush in 2000. Soon after that election at the turn of the millennium, when Jeannie also identified as conservative, her and my politics both changed a lot. Like the rest of my close family members, we ended up as progressives who agreed on just about everything. So I don’t know how you would have voted.

  I do know that you would have been vulnerable to an election’s outcomes, to sociopolitical shifts that inevitably hurt the poor first. I know you would have been a child of the working class, probably white, maybe already a mother yourself. I
know I would have prayed for you to be known not by your status or education level but by the obvious value of your merely being. Maybe, too, by what you would have given your country: a lifetime of true labor that fed and moved the world.

  This country has failed its children, August, failed its own claims about democracy and humanity. The American Dream, in particular, sometimes seems more like a ghost haunting our way of thinking than like a sacred contract worth signing toward some future.

  Maybe what holds a society together in a lasting way isn’t a calculated trade involving sacrifice, currency, and power—a wobbly claim that you get what you work for—but something more like a never-ending spiral of gifts.

  An honest economic system might still come to fruition in this place, whose most noble ideals are always available to us. That’s a dream worth having, I think. That’s a goal worth working toward.

  The best version of so many things has been conceived but remains unborn—like the girl you might have been and the country I trust your spirit is helping to create somewhere: America in high summer, tired from a season of fieldwork but clear-eyed and full of promise under the harvest moon.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to my agent, Julie Barer, and my editor, Kathryn Belden, for shepherding this book with not just intellect and skill but the rarer wisdom and knowing. Without their support during the last few years of its gestation, it would be a much different and less realized thing.

  Thank you to the Scribner publishing team. Among them, special thanks to publicist Kate Lloyd, who immediately understood the story, and to Nan Graham, for editing the memoirs of poverty and labor that shaped me as a budding journalist drawn to personal narrative. Thanks, also, to legal counsel Elisa Rivlin, whose expertise resulted in important improvements to the manuscript.

  Thank you to Carrie Frye, for a bright editorial push when I was finishing an important draft, and to Maud Newton, whose friendship as a fellow writer appeared at critical junctures in my publishing journey. Thank you to Andrew Spackman, whose presence helped me across the finish line.

  These Midwest-affiliated women stood by me when I took the personal and professional risks that allowed the book to finally manifest: Michelle Hubicki, Melanie Burdick, Marguerite Perret, Stephanie Lanter, Simran Sethi, Tara Neill, Mary Quinn, Courtney Crouch, and Amy Martin. When difficult circumstances took me to Colorado, Pat Cox opened her home to me so that I could continue working. Later in the process, these Texas writers and friends welcomed me when I moved away from Kansas for perspective: Michelle García, Alyssa Coppelman, Bryan Mealer, and Hillery Hugg. Thank you to all of them.

  During my fifteen years of research and writing, many people read, critiqued, and encouraged earlier pages that laid a foundation for these, now so different yet the same. Thank you to Patricia O’Toole, Honor Moore, Richard Locke, Lis Harris, Frank McCourt, Lauren Hoffman, Rhena Tantisunthorn Refsland, Aura Davies, Annie Choi, Gina Kaufmann, Michael Noll, and others who touched the oldest passages here.

  Thank you to the English teachers of Kansas public schools, who told a child from a family of laborers that she was a writer who deserved to be heard: in elementary school, Val Cheatham; in middle school, Patty Strothman; in high school, Stacey Walters and Lawna Bass Kurtyka; at a state university, Mary Klayder and Tom Lorenz.

  With deepest reverence, thank you to my family for surviving, with humor and dignity, the difficulties that allowed this book to exist. When I asked for their blessing to tell our shared past, they bravely answered yes. Their reasons for standing behind my work, as they sometimes told me: Because it might help someone else, and because it is true.