Madge and Sharon Rose were so used to each other they resented sharing anything with Fayrene, especially Sharon Rose. The cruelness of children astonished Cora, since it seemed so at odds with their gentle natures. Sharon Rose would go out of her way to give Fayrene pain. It perplexed Cora to sense that the punishment she gave Fayrene pleased her. Was it the wild blood of her hillbilly mother? It meant nothing to her that Fayrene was her sister. Being so much alone, Fayrene was slow to talk. She attached herself to Emerson, who didn’t want her, but out of habit he became accustomed to her, even though she reminded him of Orion. The child would toddle after him in the yard, or let him spoon-feed her at the table. If Emerson scooped her up, Sharon Rose would squeal and ask to be put down. She didn’t like to be tickled, or have her face scratched by Emerson’s beard. Tickling her, he once said, “You a cat or a kitten?”
“I’m a cat!” she cried, and clawed her little hands at him. Emerson made light of it, pinching her bottom, but it was the last time he scooped her up. It was no loss to Sharon Rose, but a real gain for Fayrene.
Whenever he had the chance, Emerson liked to say that when he came in from the field he wondered whose farm it was. People who knew Cora could believe that. There were three girls in the family, no sons, and a gasoline motor now pumped the water that was piped across the yard to her garden. The next thing he knew, it would sprinkle her grass. What she had in mind, and had explained to Orion, was water enough to flush a toilet inside the house. What difference would there be between the farm and the city if people kept it up?
At the state fair in Lincoln she had seen a gas-run contraption that would light up a house, and that would be next. For himself, Emerson didn’t want it. The bulbs burned out, they were too bright to read by, and you couldn’t turn them up and down like a lamp, only on and off. It pleased him to say that to people and listen to the comments that followed, no other woman, known to them personally, being more highly respected than Cora. She churned the best country butter, she raised the best sweet corn, and her new white Leghorn eggs ran larger and cleaner than those from the dairy people in Columbus. Of all she made, she never spent a nickel on herself.
Player rolls of the better class of music were piled five tiers high on the top of the piano, and the noise that once seemed deafening was music to which she had grown accustomed. The stout-legged Madge could pump it by sitting far forward and gripping under the keyboard to give her leverage, but Sharon Rose could sit erect on the stool and tinkle out pieces using all ten of her fingers. It was not to be believed, but she did it, with the help of Ernst Kreidel, a piano tuner. He would sit or stoop beside her, humming the tunes, reading the music, until Sharon Rose caught on to it. She was a Wunderkind, he said, meaning no harm. Not to intrude upon them, two fingers at her lips, the left hand supporting the right arm at the elbow, Cora would stand at the door to the kitchen in a transport of wonder. That the piano played by itself she accepted. These were intricacies beyond her grasping. But that Sharon Rose sat there, her thin legs dangling, much too short to reach the pedals, and with her tiny hands made this music, reassured Cora that divine power might reveal itself in what was merely human. The plump Madge, careful to make no disturbance, stood at the door with its oval pane of glass, one of her chubby fingers tracing the etched floral pattern. The only special interest Madge seemed to have was Sharon Rose. After the lesson the children would sit in the cobhouse and play with their dolls.
Cora’s efficient way of doing things for herself was not, perhaps, the best way to bring up female children. Told to fetch cobs, Madge and Sharon Rose might be gone for half an hour. Madge was willing, of course, but she was easily distracted, and watching Sharon Rose was her special talent. The girls were good at pulling taffy, making popcorn, coloring Easter eggs, and scraping the inside of the fudge pan. Cora could not rest herself while listening to the sounds of others at work. Madge would surely have learned to sew and mend faster, but Sharon Rose’s little fingers, so nimble on the keyboard, burned themselves, cut themselves, and dropped things without handles like plates and eggs. Knowing it would happen, Cora was soon there to shoo them out of the kitchen and clean up the mess. Sometimes the little girls could be heard giggling beneath the cloth that covered the dining room table, poor little Fayrene wondering what it was all about. Actually, she was more at her ease with the grownups, who lifted her to their laps or sat her on the backs of horses, than she was with the puzzling world of her sister. Why did she giggle? Fayrene was too young to know, too shy to ask.
These were good years for Cora. Many things confirmed her feeling that the rightness of their lives was His rightness. Chickens, people, and eggs had their appointed places, chores their appointed time, changes their appointed seasons, the night its appointed sleep. Emerson exhibited hogs and apples at the fair in Lincoln, from where he returned with his face nicked by a barber. He liked to lie out horizontal in the chair, with a hot towel on his face, and be raised or lowered. It seemed to Cora he belched less at the table now, and deferred to her in moments of decision. At the stove, where he scratched his matches, or at the screen, where he dried his hands, he might ask her opinion on the Leghorns as layers. It would be his opinion when she heard it next.
When Cora came to the screen, fanning the dead air with her apron, and gazed across the green lawn with its pattern of posts and wickets, the striped balls gleaming like eggs painted for Easter, the sad keening of the mourning doves filled her with a sorrowful pleasure, more satisfying to her nature than a blithe, careless happiness. In the chill of the morning, or the cool of the evening, the air heavy with the drone of insects, Cora’s contentment might be so great it aroused her guilt. What had she done to be favored with such peace of mind?
At the school on Friday afternoons, Sharon Rose played music with Leah Sobotka, who could read and write in English but hardly speak it. Leah wore her yellow hair in braids that often got in the way as she played the cello. Madge would stand at the piano and turn the pages of the music for Sharon. It vexed Emerson to hear how little interest Madge showed in boys. She was now a plump, strapping girl, and when she put up her hair she looked like a young woman. Sharon Rose he put clean out of his mind when she visited a friend, in Columbus, and came back with her hair cut like a man’s, short at the back.
Fayrene had the room off the kitchen to herself, hot in the summer but cozy over the winter. When she heard the creak of the boards in the ceiling, she opened up the stove drafts, put kerosene on the cobs and water in the kettle, and went back to bed. Time had proved that it was best to let Cora light the fire and start the day by herself. Both of the older girls stayed out of the kitchen till the food was cooked.
Cora was so long accustomed to doing things by herself she found it irksome if someone tried to help her. She carried her elbows high, even with her hands empty, and often caught the girls where they claimed to be tender. The meal might be delayed while they waited for Emerson to make his way back from the outbilly, wash and dry his hands, then drink the pitcher of buttermilk to relieve his stomach. In his own opinion he suffered from the weight of undigested cuds of chewing tobacco. They weighed on him at night, but after drinking the buttermilk, and several rumbling belches, they were gone. Whether Sharon Rose said that Emerson should eat with his pigs, or said something that merely implied it, it was Cora’s house and a compromise was reached that he would drink his buttermilk away from the table. Emerson didn’t let it rile him. A girl with Belle as a mother and Orion for a father could be expected to act mighty peculiar. Cora served hot biscuits, on the flat side, oatmeal cooked to the texture of taffy, cream thick as syrup, eggs fried hard in bacon grease, bread, butter, honey, and coffee. Except for grace, said by one of the girls, there was no talk. In the winter a lamp burned at the center of the table, the wick curled in a pool of oil, the flame reflected in the orbs of Sharon Rose like those of a cat. Emerson couldn’t tell you whether she blinked or not, since he wasn’t going to pay her that kind of attention. If she thought people mig
ht stare at her she wouldn’t blink at all.
It was Orion’s custom, in the midmorning, to stop and warm himself in Cora’s kitchen. He might eat what the girls had left over, or she might stir up a batter and make him some flapjacks. It troubled her to think what sort of life he led in his own house. When she went over to change his sheets she would find dog hair on everything she touched. The Bohemian girl, Anna, who had surely been willing, married a widower in Olney with five small children, three of them girls. Cora could not sort out in her mind if this was man’s or God’s injustice. Piled along the wall beside Orion’s bed were magazines with stories about the Wild West, full of cowboys and Indians, as well as tales of adventure in faraway places. Cora had stooped to glance at the illustrations. What life had been like before she came to the plains she feared to know about.
Orion loved to shoot his guns—Cora could hear the crack of his rifle, like a winter branch snapping—but he had stopped bringing her what he had killed. She saw the pelts stretched on racks in the basement. To bring her a moose rug—it was his way of joshing—he took off to hunt in Canada, with Ned Kibbee, a Norfork carpenter. Three weeks later Ned Kibbee returned alone. Where was Orion? He had gone to war. But who had he found to go to war with? There was a war in Europe, Ned Kibbee explained, and Orion had signed up to help the Canadians, who were taking the side of the English. He had acted the way he did fearing it might be over before he got into it. What he liked about a war was the free ammunition, and a place to shoot. Nor would it be a long one, in Ned Kibbee’s opinion, with young men like Orion so willing and eager to fight it. During the time he was away Ned Kibbee would be free to live in his house and look after his dogs.
The war did not end, as Ned Kibbee had predicted. From what she heard and read in Capper’s Weekly, Cora learned that Americans would soon bring it to a quick conclusion. They had one letter from Orion, mailed from England, in which he asked for chocolate and tobacco. He had never used tobacco. Perhaps he had asked for it for a friend. It was all so far away Cora did not know what to think. Ned Kibbee enlisted, rather than be drafted, and went to Fort Riley, Kansas, for his training. When he stopped writing, Madge thought he had gone to war, but instead he had come down with the influenza. Madge went down to help nurse him. Half the people in the fort were sick, and many died. The first armistice declared was false, but a real one was determined and the war was over before Ned Kibbee got to fight in it.
Without a word of any kind, Orion was seen in the streets of Battle Creek, where Dr. Geltmayer recognized him and brought him to the farm. Cora thought the stranger at the door was a salesman. He wore rumpled city clothes, and his voice and manner had changed. Emerson wasn’t sure it was his own brother until they had sat and talked a bit together. He had been gassed in the war. Most of his time had been spent in hospitals. His eyes moved from side to side as he talked. He knew Sharon Rose and Madge, and the names of his dogs, but he seemed to have forgotten about Fayrene. Speaking to the girls, he said, “Yes, ma’am,” or “No, ma’am,” as if they were young ladies. He was at ease with Cora, picking up where they had been when he left.
At the table he might have long spells of wheezing, his red face filmed with perspiration, his eyes popped. He never mentioned the war, but he spoke of friends and places in England. In the hospital he had learned to play cards and do tricks with coins. In spite of the tremor of his hands he could stand a dime on its edge on a table. Fayrene never tired of the way he could tilt a quarter back and forth on the back of his knuckles. If Ned Kibbee and Madge went to a movie in town, he went along for the ride. Cora was told, but she did not believe, that he had a manicure while he was being shaved. Later he would stand in the hotel lobby playing dice for cigars.
Because he was disabled in the service of his country he received a pension he could live on. He had always been so gentle with women he behaved as if he was courting. He brought Cora bars of clear glycerin soap she put away for a special occasion, if one should occur. He gave to the girls boxes of Whitman’s chocolates, with the flavors printed in the box lids. This discouraged Sharon Rose from biting into something, then putting it back. Cora kept to herself the fact that Orion relieved himself from the porch, rather than troubling to walk to the privy. It worried Cora that the girls might see him, since he often seemed unaware of their presence. Madge was now a young lady, with a beau, but when Sharon Rose used the outbilly, at night, she liked Madge to go along with her and wait in the dark. Cora herself would have preferred to be frightened rather than suffer the humiliation of an escort. Sharon Rose was at once fearless and as timid as a child.
The day Sharon Rose came back from Lincoln, where she had gone to enroll in the university, she was let off at the trail between the two houses while Ned and Madge sat in the buggy, spooning. Knowing they would hear her, knowing Cora would hear her, hoping the people in Battle Creek would hear her, she had screamed, “Is he looking for a wife or a housemaid?”
Cora had been on the screened-in porch, ironing; she had stood leaning on the iron, speechless. Nothing had prepared her to believe that Sharon Rose had such resentment, such bitterness, in her. Cora had followed her into Fayrene’s room, off the kitchen, seized her by the wrist, and whacked her palm with the back of a hairbrush, sharply. How well they knew what Sharon Rose thought of her hands! “That will teach you!” Cora cried, knowing that it wouldn’t even as she said it. Not Sharon Rose. She had turned from Cora and run up the stairs.
“Mama,” Madge had called, “now don’t you cross her. She don’t mean it the way you hear it!”
In no world Cora cared to live in would she be so kind, so slow to take offense. In her soul she knew that Sharon Rose meant it even worse than she said it. She had come back from Lincoln hoping to share with Madge everything she had seen, and felt, and experienced, only to ride three in the seat of a buggy where she knew she wasn’t wanted. The wild streak she had from her mother had made her cry out. Cora liked Ned Kibbee, and felt that Madge, a plain enough girl to look at, was fortunate to have him. What in heaven’s name did Sharon Rose have in mind for Madge to do? Madge had no desire at all to waste time in school she could spend with Ned Kibbee. Was it envy? Was she possessive? Was it her pride that had been injured? Reasons were not lacking to explain such an outburst, but they did not satisfy Cora. In spite of her assurance that she had acted rightly, her cooling fury left her troubled. In Sharon’s glance, when Cora had seized her, there had been less anger than pity. Pity for Cora, who felt no pity for herself. She leaned on the cabinet, propped on her spread arms, as Madge rattled the dipper in the water bucket.
“She likes Ned,” Madge said. “She just don’t like farmers,” then she went off with the pail to the pump.
Whatever Madge had said, whatever she had meant, Cora’s numbed, flickering awareness understood what she had implied. However much Sharon Rose disliked farmers, her scorn for farmers’ wives was greater. She pitied Cora, who seemed to lack the sense to pity herself.
Ned and Madge were married in Olney, where he had his own people, then they came back to Cora’s yard for the food and the reception. Under trees that Emerson had planted, on grass that had been freshly mowed that morning, they sat at picnic tables Ned had borrowed from the Burlington Railroad. During the eating and later the children played croquet with balls so new and bright they looked sticky. Ribbons were tied to the wickets as the lights dimmed, so the elderly wouldn’t trip on them. Ned Kibbee wore the first pair of white flannel pants Cora had ever seen. There could surely be nothing more elegant and impractical. In the early dusk, candles were lit in the three sagging rows of Japanese lanterns. It made Cora almost dizzy to follow the zigzag flight of the bats. She would write to Sharon Rose, who had moved to Lincoln, that Ned Kibbee’s relations were all upright people, three of whom had come from Sioux City, two with wives, to see him married. Other than what that implied, no admonishment. Sharon Rose would have to learn, by living her own life, that such losses were not easily recovered. From Omaha she sent M
adge a comb and brush set in a velvet-lined case, the brush with silver backing, brushing Madge’s hair being one of those things she really missed.
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