Undiscovered Country

by Kelly O'Connor McNees

  As the elevator clanked and shuddered to my floor, I unsheathed my fate from the envelope. Hope springs eternal—usually right before I get sucker punched in the gut. In November, the paper said, I’d be going to South Dakota.

  Chapter Seventeen

  November 1933

  But not Bowdle is what I told myself in the weeks leading up to the trip. That no-horse town was not on my itinerary. Not the farm, not that barn I had fought my way out of all those years ago—the place to which I’d vowed never to return. Half the booze I’d drunk over the decades was meant to be a disinfectant, to rid my memory of Bowdle. I touched the lump my necklace made beneath my blouse. There wasn’t a reason under the sun that I’d need to go there.

  As I set out for my trip and starting driving west, I conjured Nora’s reassuring voice: “Look at all that you have achieved, darling. Those long-ago days have no hold on you anymore!” That got me through until I crossed into Minnesota, where the temperature dropped and the wind howled its disapproval of my presence. Then I began to feel a little dread: Bluette seemed to shrink around me and I had to crack the windows in order to breathe. The cigarettes I smoked one after another sent embers whizzing onto the seat beside me and singed the leather upholstery. As I drew closer to that prairie and its washed-out hues, the years and the accomplishments I had stacked up around me like a wall began to fall away. Hick was back in the sticks. And the sticks was trying to get back into me.

  I stopped for lunch at a diner in Benson with a red-striped awning and a wanted poster in the window that was half warning, half boast: Bonnie and Clyde had robbed the place over the summer. Somehow, seeing it helped me get my head on straight again. Folks here were down and out and upside down, and I had a job to do. While I waited for my meat loaf in the booth by the window, I flipped through a copy of the previous day’s Minneapolis Daily Tribune and read the work of fine local reporters. Farmers in these parts were threatening to embargo the sale of their wheat if the government didn’t do something to stop the plummeting prices, and the governor of North Dakota proposed calling up the National Guard to stop them.

  On page three was a story penned by none other than John Bosco, Associated Press. It was one of those only-in-New-York tales that smaller papers printed for their readers’ amusement: MURDEROUS MAID EXPOSED WHEN CANARY SINGS—to cops. I thought of John’s goofy ears and his worn-out trench coat, the way he had stuffed the pockets full of hors d’oeuvres the night of the election. How fine it felt to see the words my friend had typed, even if they made me realize how very far I was from home. With careful fingers, I tore the article from the paper and made a few corrections—the copyeditor had neglected to replace convince with persuade where the latter was appropriate, and in the penultimate line John had used then as a conjunction, which was not strictly incorrect but still hard on the ear, so I penciled in a carat crowned with and. I would drop this little love note in the mail on my way out of town.

  My next appointment took me to a farm outside Aberdeen to interview a wheat farmer and try to gauge his sympathies, if any, for the communist cause. People at the federal level were worried it would take hold in places like this with folks angry and desperate and likely to see the well-off as the villains. But I found no copies of Das Kapital lying around, and no man about the place—in fact, only a very pregnant woman and ten other children in a house without a stitch of bedding. I thought instantly, of course, of Ruth, of West Virginia, of the same sort of suffering in different terrain.

  “The older ones are called Samuel, Catherine, Dorothy, Timothy,” she said, pointing them out where they stood against the walls and in the rude little kitchen. “The rest …” She gazed helplessly around. “You see, it’s hard to keep them all straight. But this little girl here”— she clutched the arm of the nearest one, about six years old, with two big crooked teeth—“she’s real good. She doesn’t give me a bit of trouble.”

  Anonymous smiled at me and I smiled back at her. “And your husband?” I asked. “Is he going to be home soon?” The man never gives you a moment’s peace, I thought, judging by the size of this brood.

  She waved her hand. “He’s out picking thistle for soup.”

  Russian thistle. I remembered that from my girlhood. It dried up like barbed wire each fall and rolled up and down the road. When cows ate it, they got sores all around their mouths, but in hard times people boiled it with a few moldy potatoes, and it kept you from the brink. I could still feel the spiny fibers in my mouth, the way they would stick between your teeth. Just to feel something real instead of that awful memory, I pressed the tip of my tongue against the tooth that had been bothering me for a week or more and the firecracker of pain gave me a strange moment of relief.

  Bowdle was only fifty miles from where I stood.

  I went back into town to see what could be done about getting a doctor out to that woman when her time came and found one called Angstrom, who thought he might be able to get some of the supplies he needed from the storeroom the Red Cross kept in the back of the Lutheran church.

  “They have a whole lot of good things over there,” Dr. Angstrom said, a little stupidly, I thought, for a doctor.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “Could you point me in the direction of that church, please?” My only comfort came from envisioning Nora’s reaction when I shared the tales of these moribund towns with her. We would lament together over a bottle of wine how the people suffered not just from the crash itself but from the decades of isolation, the lack of education. We would talk about how Arthurdale would pave the way for change across rural America—what it would do when we got it up and running.

  In the office at Holy Trinity, I met the church secretary, who was sitting on a folding chair behind a card table and talking on the phone. She wore a thick wool sweater over her dress and the tip of her nose was pink.

  “My job,” I explained when she hung up, “is simply to make sure that the local government here is doing everything it can to give people what they need.”

  “Well, you can’t get blood from a turnip,” she said.

  “Don’t I know it. And I realize that you are not a government official, obviously, but is it true that you have some kind of storeroom here? Donations from the Red Cross?”

  Her gaze flicked to something behind my head and back at me. I turned to see a hook on the opposite wall; hanging on it was a key on a piece of red string.

  “Would you let me see it? As you might know, there is a woman up the road planning to give birth on her bare dirt floor.” Surely this secretary already knew of the family: it was a very small town. After a long moment, she nodded, then stood and crossed over to the key.

  “I don’t know about this ‘Brains Trust,’” she said, miming quotation marks with her fingers as we padded across the carpet.

  “Pardon?”

  “I like the man—I voted for him—but he’s getting pushed around by a bunch of eggheads.”

  “He” was FDR. I nearly smiled at the image of the president surrounded by a marauding band of professors in sweater vests, shoving him and shouting about the finer points of macroeconomics.

  I shrugged in a way that I hoped seemed friendly. “What I know about fiscal policy, you could fit in a shoe,” I said.

  “What those men know about farming and cows …” She trailed off and shook her head. “Fools leading fools.”

  She turned the key in the padlock on the storeroom door and switched on the light. The shelves, from floor to ceiling, were jammed with wool blankets, thick quilts, cabled sweaters. Bolts of flannel were stacked on the floor next to sacks of new long underwear, still in its packaging.

  Again, I only closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I felt a headache coming on, and my molar ached. “Don’t you think,” I said, and took a steadying breath, “that that woman, and everyone else in this town, could sure use some of these warm linens and clothes?”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry, but we are saving them for an emergency.
”

  I stared at her and thought of the wind cutting through the expectant mother’s shack, the sore-mouthed cows, the farmers destroying their crops in protest. “Well, just what in the hell do you think this is?”

  Later, I took Route 12 west out of town, still fuming, and squinted at my map to find the road that would take me south. As Bluette sailed down the frosted lane, I thought about what I would put in my report. People aren’t going hungry for lack of food, I’d explain. We’ve got plenty of food, but a shortage of heart. And brains. My cigarette gave me little comfort; when I brought it to my lips, my fingers were like ice against my skin and I tried to shake some warmth into them. I recalled the four seasons of the year in Dakota: flood, grasshoppers, dust, and frostbite.

  The road scrolled by me for a long time and I let my mind roam free. On another cold day like this one, I had stood beside Nora in front of the tenor’s window while we listened to him rehearse the aria that made my heart leap within me. Our hands hung just an inch apart, but, standing there on the sidewalk for all the world to see, we could not allow them to close the space between us. We might have looked a little like one of those drawings of an optical illusion, in which a second image can be seen in the negative space. That day in front of the tenor’s window, would a viewer have seen a picture of two women standing together or a picture of an ache framed by the curve of their arms?

  After a while, the sameness of the land in every direction played a trick on my eyes, and I began to question whether I had taken the turn to the south or had missed it. There were no signs on the road, no houses, no other cars. Just the pavement and the dishrag sky. Had I turned or not? Was I headed south, or west?

  I felt the skin on my neck pucker with apprehension and I glanced at the map again, as if it meant something. When another road finally appeared, I turned left on it. Still I saw no road signs, no reassurance. And yet I began to recognize the road. My right hand went to my pendant.

  On the right was the Houskas’ farm, where a half-dozen skinny cows mashed their bodies together next to the barn to keep out of the wind. I smoked, listening to my breath. When the weathered fence ended, there was another open space, then another farm. I crossed a bridge over the ghost of a stream and arrived where I’d never wanted to go: Chateau Hickok, stamped on the dead land like a black eye on a face that was ugly to begin with.

  The windows were dark. The door my mother had painted bright red in an act of rebellion against my father, perhaps her only one, was now pink-gray and hung askew in the frame. Bluette’s engine chugged in the silence and I let it run. I knew if I turned it off in this cold, I might not get it started again. I mashed my cigarette into the ashtray and, as if pulled by the hand of a phantom, took the car out of gear and set the hand brake. I got out and started walking. But it wasn’t the house I wanted to see. It was the barn.

  The wind smacked my whole body, nearly knocking me off my feet. I was bareheaded—foolish city woman, with no wool hat!—and I felt the pins in my hair lift off my scalp. I picked up my pace and recalled the many times I’d walked this exact same way, crossing from the house to do my chores, a kitten tucked in my sweater so it wouldn’t freeze. The cold scoured my cheeks.

  I got inside and yanked the door closed behind me. The wind whistled through the gaps in the boards but the space was otherwise quiet. I stood very still and braced myself for the tidal wave of anguish I’d been dreading. Over the years, no matter where I went, it was here that my mind returned, like a dog sniffing around a grave. I had, after all, worn a piece of this place around my neck for decades, a talisman to protect me from ever coming back.

  And yet here I was.

  At some point, the barn had been emptied and swept clean. The floor was bare dirt and the buckets and crates were gone. The hooks on the walls were empty. But still there in the corner was the site of the hen-shit-covered hay where he’d pushed me down.

  I thought about who I had been the last time I’d stood in this spot, lean fourteen-year-old little Hick with long brown hair and a fierce mien. A girl who’d just had the facts of life slammed into her by a miserable excuse for a father. But somehow instead of crumpling, she had picked up that stave and bashed her way out of this barn, of this prairie, of the life that fate had tried to pin on her.

  A bubble rose in my chest and I waited for the tears to come. But when my eyes pulled back at the temples, what I heard was a belly laugh I usually needed three drinks in order to muster. The sound astonished me; it was so loud. I leaned over with my hands on my knees, cackling to beat the band.

  This was just a goddamn barn.

  There were no ghosts here, no undead buried body that might reach up out of the dirt to grab my ankle and hold me prisoner. I’d been telling myself a story for so long that had this place at the center—this old barn. But I saw now that it was just one place, and the day my father raped me just one day among many days. My life was a thousand times bigger than any one of them.

  The clasp on the necklace gave easily, and I hung it on one of the empty hooks. Then I turned on my heel and went back out into the cold. The specter of Little Hick ran ahead of me, hurrying out to the road to hitchhike her way into town. But I walked at my own pace, despite the howling wind, because I had finally realized nothing was chasing me.

  Back in the car, I switched on the little electric heater on the passenger side and watched the coils begin to glow red. The thin stream of heat thawed my numb face, and I thanked the god in which I didn’t believe, and Hearst and his newspapers, and Louis Chevrolet, for delivering me, just as I was, into this moment. And Little Hick—I thanked her too.

  “Office of the first lady. Mrs. Thompson speaking. How may I help you?”

  Of course, it was the middle of the afternoon in Washington and Nora had to be busy with a thousand different things, but this was big—I couldn’t wait to tell her. She had seen me through so much grief over that barn. I wanted to tell her how I’d left that necklace dangling on the hook, that I could finally put it all behind me.

  “Hi, Tommy—it’s Hick,” I said, standing nearly breathless at the table in the shabby hotel lobby. “Is Mrs. Roosevelt in?”

  “Hick! Lovely to hear from you. How is life on the road? Where are you calling from?”

  “South Dakota,” I said. “Listen, is she there? It’s quite important.”

  “Let me check. Hold on for a moment.”

  I glanced around the dim lobby and felt the deflating effects of its nicked furniture, the mousetrap I spied in the corner that held a dusty cube of cheese. It seemed like a place that could drive a jolly man to suicide in under forty-five minutes. I pulled the chair out from the telephone table and sat down in front of a window that framed the barren Dakota landscape. In spring, I knew, this land could be beautiful— feathered with gray-green shoots of prairie grass that turned golden by June. That’s what kept people here, the clean slate each new year promised, though it hardly ever made good. How a mere promise, so easily made, could keep us hanging on in hope, enduring against the odds, against the facts.

  “Miss Hickok?”

  “Louis?”

  “How are you enjoying that beautiful car?”

  My feeling of triumph was leaking away with every minute I sat with the phone pressed to my ear. “It’s wonderful,” I said. “I can’t believe how long I got by without one. It was such a generous gift.”

  “Well,” he said, “I know how much she was looking forward to giving it to you.”

  If that’s true, I wanted to ask, then why didn’t I know about it? Why did Louis know more about what Nora was looking forward to than I did? And when was the last time she and I had even spoken?

  “Louis,” I said, “I won’t take more than a minute of her time—I swear—but could you please put Mrs. Roosevelt on?”

  “I wish I could, but she is preparing for a meeting this afternoon and can’t speak now, but I’ll be sure to pass along—”

  “Please,” I said, my voice near to breaking.
“Please just tell her it’s about Bowdle. About the barn.”

  I heard the crackle of his hand covering the receiver. She was probably sitting next to him at the table, the phone wheeled over to them on some priceless antique cart.

  “Miss Hickok, she says she’ll call you back later—”

  I scrambled for something to keep him, and my precarious connection to Nora, on the line. “Well, another thing, Louis—it’s been ages since I’ve heard a status report on Arthurdale. Where are we on the selection process? The construction? Have you heard anything about Ruth Johnson’s family?” I felt my cheeks getting hot. I knew I sounded desperate, but I didn’t care. Damnit—why wouldn’t he just put her on the line?

  “Can’t speak to individual cases, but everything’s moving forward. Mrs. R can fill you in when she calls. We have your itinerary—she knows the hotel.”

  “But I’m not—”

  In the background I heard voices, dishes, the shuffling of chairs and paper. “Okay, then,” Louis said, “signing off now. Please travel safely, and we’ll see you soon.” The phone clicked off, and I lowered the receiver.

  They had my itinerary, but my detour to Bowdle had me off course and I was staying in a different hotel. I’m not, I had tried to say to him, where I’m supposed to be.