by Rae Meadows
“Ruthie? Got any peanuts or something? My stomach’s talking.”
Samuel watched little Ruth walk toward them, her white bun high on her head, her cherry-candy lipstick bleeding into the seams around her mouth.
“Kidding me? You-all would never leave,” she said. “You been courting that beer all night as it is.”
Samuel was glad for the distraction from the grim business of winter. At home, the three of them trudged forward, hunkered down by the season, each doing and doing—boat, school, house, larder, church—without looking up,
“How old are them dinosaur bones, anyway?” one of the men said.
“Thousands of years old. Millions? I don’t know.”
“Before Adam and Eve?”
“It’s confusing, isn’t it?”
The men lowered their voices, but Samuel could still hear them, Ruth’s mostly emptied out by now.
“Speaking of the Old Testament, you hear about the boat?”
“Heard about it.”
“I almost wish the damn flood would come. Sorry lot he drew,” one of the men said.
Jeanette, who had sauntered in from the café, stood in front of them and blew smoke in their direction. “Will you two just shut up?” she said.
“It’s all right,” Samuel said.
“I meant no disrespect,” one of the farmers said.
Samuel nodded, not caring what people thought. Jeanette fiddled with the radio dial until she hit on a crackly big band number.
“So the mayor never came back.”
“Can’t really blame him.”
Samuel was sorry about that. He had liked Jack Lily, appreciated his seriousness, his equanimity.
Jeanette stubbed out her cigarette in the old snuff tin on the counter and filled Samuel’s beer.
“We’re stuck with that college kid,” one of the farmers said.
“Think you could do better? Throw your old hat in the ring then,” she said.
“You know me, doll face. I’m not good for much.”
She laughed.
“I do believe that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you tell the truth,” she said, shaking her backside as she walked away.
“I hear Dwight’s got himself on the dole.”
“A fiddle don’t pay the bills.”
“We’re all a bunch of fools trying to farm the desert.”
“Can’t argue with you there,” Samuel said. The men nodded in solemn agreement.
He watched the calendar, always eager to x out another short and brutal day. He watched the weather, hoping for snow deep and white but settling for gray pellets that felt like buckshot on his skin. We watch each other, Samuel thought, so tired of these careworn faces.
“We got eggs,” one of the farmers said.
“No shit?”
“The girls are laying.”
“Well, hell. Here I thought spring would never come.”
Ruth rang her cowbell for last call.
“Don’t make me go, Ruthie.”
“I’ll be open tomorrow.” Her tongue rooted around her teeth until she worked something out. “You can dream about me in the meantime.”
Samuel drank what was left in his glass, lifting it again to get the very last of it. He had made it through another day.
* * *
SAMUEL AND ANNIE didn’t talk about what they had lost. Annie packed Fred’s shirts and pants and socks with holes in them and half-used notepads and rusty toy cars and comic strips and bitten pencils and egg tabulation charts and a postcard Samuel had sent him from Oklahoma City—the only mail he’d ever gotten—and the pillowcase that still smelled faintly of little-boy hair, in a small tin trunk she took out to the old dugout.
* * *
AND THEN SAMUEL raised his eyes one day and they had done it, it was March, and they had made it through the freeze. He could feel the earth, himself, soften, ever so slightly. He could go longer without gloves on, work longer without lights on. Spring is God’s promise, Pastor Hardy said.
The chicks had begun to peck at their shells from the inside, breaking through. Spring came barreling in like a circus train, with colors, sounds, and smells they had all almost forgotten were possible. The grasshoppers were gone. The still-damp ground held, and the warming days brought the wheat out, tillers reaching up to the sun.
Samuel had finished the boat.
* * *
STYRON WAS GIDDY. The ground was still exposed for miles and the snowmelt had not been enough, but the communal sense in Mulehead was that, with spring, things were looking up. But more important, Jack Lily had written to say that he was staying in Chicago indefinitely, tying up his father’s affairs, managing the creamery with his brother. Styron would be acting mayor until the next election. He shoved the piles of papers on the mayor’s desk ceremoniously to the side with a sweep of his arm. Hattie had given him a glass owl paperweight, which he moved to the desk, along with his “big idea” binder and his coffee thermos. He left the ledgers and budgets and tax codes and federal guidelines for assistance where they were.
It was only weeks until his wedding, and he thought of Hattie now with great affection. Her adoration. Her warm hands and ready laugh. He didn’t worry about love. He would christen the old Hollister house the Mayoral Mansion. He and Hattie would spend their wedding night there, amid the smell of borax and new paint.
“Styron.”
He bolted up as if caught in the act itself.
“Sorry to come unannounced.” It was Samuel Bell. How small he looked, Styron thought, with his sunken cheeks and hanging trousers.
“The mayor’s door is always open,” Styron said, arms wide.
Bell cocked his head a little and pursed his lips.
“Jack’s not coming back. Got the word this morning.”
“Congratulations, then. You’ve been doing a fine job of it already, I suspect.”
“Appreciate that.” Styron remembered then how Gladys Abernathy had cornered him after church a few weeks back.
“It’s a disgrace, this business with the Bell girl,” she’d said. “Flaunting it like that. In school. In front of the other children. It’s obscene is what it is.”
“What would you have me do, ma’am?”
“Make her take her studies at home.”
Have you forgotten about the boy they lost, he’d wanted to ask her.
Styron felt for the Bells, so he had been dragging his feet on the matter. There had been an anonymous letter, too, last week, signed “Concerned mothers.” People down on their luck were always looking for something to chew on to make them feel worthy.
“I was in town, thought I’d stop by,” Samuel said.
Bell wasn’t going to ask about going on assistance, now, was he? Styron thought.
“What’s on your mind?” Styron asked.
“The boat’s done.”
Styron clapped.
“Well, goddamn. Excuse my language.”
Styron imagined the ark in the center of the town square. You decided what you had that no other town had; then you marketed it until the cows came home. You told people it was a place to visit, you made it so.
“I could use some help. To get it out of the barn.”
“Great, great. Let’s haul her out!” Styron was nearly at the door. “Can I get a ride with you?”
“I’ve got Ford and Jensen and his boys coming Saturday round noon. Lunch, of course.”
“Oh, sure. Saturday. Saturday would be fine.”
“Bring Hattie if you’d like. Annie could use the company.”
* * *
AT SCHOOL NO one derided Birdie, but no one talked to her either. Mary Stem counted discovering Birdie’s pregnancy as one of her greatest achievements. Birdie had made it a good way into winter before the whispering had begun. Mary noticed that Birdie could no longer button her coat. Before the truth had come out, Luke Carlton had asked her to the dance. She’d sewn two side panels of floral fabric into the dress her mother had made her fo
r her sixteenth birthday. A week later, he’d disinvited her with a smudged note he’d handed to her on the bus.
Birdie’s chair was now so far back from her desk she had to lean over to get pencil to paper. It was a good thing she had to make an effort to reach, or she was sure to fall asleep. She took her shame and rolled it around in her mind until it came out as defiance—she didn’t care much about school, but she never considered that she should stop coming, and, after Fred, her parents didn’t seem to notice much of what she did. Her father had his boat, which he had taken to sleeping in, working until exhaustion, then dragging himself under a load of blankets in its center. Her mother cleaned and cleaned, determined to rid the house of every last speck of grit and dust. When she wasn’t cleaning, she read books—her only outings were to church and to the library in Herman—boring old ones like Birdie had to read for English class. With spring, she had her garden. Her mother looked at Birdie strangely but she never got angry. Disappointed, of course, but distant. There had been no great scene and there wouldn’t be.
She thought about the apron sometimes. Why was it there, Mama? Her mother wasn’t forgetful, didn’t lose things. Birdie turned over her suspicions in her mind: she and the mayor together behind the church, him driving all the way to the house, talking through the screen, Fred had told her. There was what you saw and there was the hidden life underneath, and you don’t know it when you’re a child and then you do and growing up doesn’t seem so great anymore. And then she remembered the day she and Cy had come upon Jack Lily at Woodrow’s. Where Fred had found her mother’s apron. The mattress. Putting the two of them together there made her feel suspended, the ground out of reach. She tried to push the idea away. If it was true—and how could it possibly be true?—it was better to let it be, she told herself. Jack Lily was gone. Her mother was not.
It was increasingly difficult to milk the cow, but she went out morning and night to tend to Greta without complaint. She never saw her parents talk. When Birdie spoke, it sounded too loud in the silent house. Her words hung in the air until she wasn’t sure if anyone had heard her at all. An elbow poked out, or a foot or a fist, as the baby turned over, the whoosh a feeling she had not gotten used to.
Birdie was glad for school, if only to get out of the house. The classroom smelled of chalk and old wood and musty textbooks, but it was comforting. I will remember this room with fondness, she thought, when I’m a thousand miles away from here. She did not have a plan. She dreamed of jumping a train heading west. She dreamed of oranges.
* * *
ANNIE DIDN’T MIND cooking for the men. It was good that Jack Lily didn’t come back, she told herself, but it was hard to shelve possibility, the hazy what-if. She had finally unpacked the suitcase she’d hidden under the bed. She diced winter carrots and cut the eyes from potatoes, and now, everything with him seemed so long ago. When the world had Fred in it. When she was different.
Samuel called her Annie again all the time now, a new gentleness in his voice. They were careful with each other, hesitant, unsure. They refused to disagree. Whatever you’d like. It’s okay with me. You’re right. You don’t? Okay, I don’t either.
“Annie? Styron’s not here yet, but we’re going to get started.”
“Okay,” she said, pulling a remnant feather from a chicken.
“Wish us luck.”
She smiled. “You’ll do just fine.”
It was the kind of day that made them all forget about how bad it had been. Just warm enough in the sun, the air thick with the smells of earth and dung and hay. Ford, a squat man with a thick neck, farmed to the south, and wiry Jensen, who had come to Mulehead at the same time as Samuel, farmed toward Beaver with his grown sons. There had been a time when the three had joined together for threshing before they each got their own tractor-pulled machine. They had all come to the Plains looking for a future, and Samuel knew they were as tied to the land as he was. No number of dust storms and weak yields would chase them off. They didn’t talk about what the boat was for. But they answered the call because they were neighbors, because they had history.
“You sure we’re getting this thing out?” Jensen asked.
“We’re going to try,” Samuel said.
“I guess we got God on our side,” Ford said, eliciting a chuckle from Jensen’s two sons.
“Maybe he’ll give us a little push,” Samuel said, smiling.
Styron arrived with Hattie done up in a purple dress with a matching hat. An enameled peacock brooch sat high on her chest. The men stopped and watched as they got out of the car.
“Mayor of Mulehead,” Ford said under his breath.
“And his queen,” Jensen’s son added.
“He’s here to help,” Samuel said.
Styron jogged over, his cheeks ruddy.
“Gentlemen,” he said.
The others nodded.
“Thanks for coming,” Samuel said.
He pulled open the doors of the barn, and the sun shot through to the boat, illuminating the hulking midsection, whose supports pushed right against the barn walls.
“You son of a gun,” Jensen said. “You really did it.”
Styron looked like a boy who’d hooked his first fish. “Outstanding,” he said.
The men squeezed into what little space remained, the bow and stern each nearly touching a wall. A hutch across the beam for shelter, a deep hull for storage, covered over to keep it from filling with rain. The boat was massive, not graceful, perhaps, but radiant still, varnished a dark umber, nearly glowing in the midday sun.
One of the Jensen boys ran his hand along the flank.
“You did this all by yourself?” he asked.
“Fred helped me a bunch,” Samuel said, dropping his chin.
“A fine vessel you’ve made here,” Jensen said. “I don’t pretend to understand. But I know good work when I see it.”
Samuel touched the man’s shoulder in acknowledgment.
“What do you say, boys?”
With claps and hoots they shook off the reverential tone that had befallen them.
Samuel had already dismantled part of the mow so they could take the boat straight out.
“Get wheels under it on both ends. Use the truck if we need to,” he said. “It’s heavy. We’re going to have to move it inch by inch.”
“Sure, sure,” Styron said, unsure of where to direct his energy. “You built a goddamn ark, man!”
* * *
“I MEAN, IS it too much to ask to have the house ready for our wedding reception? They said the curtains would be ready last week. I ordered this gorgeous rose damask print they had to ship from Philadelphia. Can you imagine? All the way from a big city in the East?”
Annie let Hattie chatter on. She patted the biscuit dough onto her floured board. Hattie had brought a green bean casserole and was now slowly, arduously, peeling apples for a pie. Her pace will change, Annie thought, when she has children.
“I’m sure they will be lovely,” Annie said.
She thought of Fred and how he used to run and skid into his seat at the table, his smile revealing the chipped corner of his front tooth, from when he was six and it wasn’t even in all the way and he slipped climbing into the bathtub.
Birdie came in from the chickens, her big belly stretching her dress—one that had been her mother’s—tight.
“Oh,” Hattie said.
Birdie stood with her hands on her back, chin thrust straight out, refusing to demur.
“Hello, Miss Daniels,” she said. “Looks like a boat is getting born out there.”
Hattie, at a rare loss for words, merely nodded, a smile lagging.
“Birdie, help with the table,” Annie said.
* * *
IT TOOK HOURS of lifting and maneuvering to get the boat atop the two old tractor axles Samuel had rigged. He tried to chain the front axle to the truck, but the boat kept slipping, so they pushed and adjusted, pushed and pulled, little by little, bringing the boat out into the sha
rp light of the day.
“Where you want it?” Ford huffed, leaning against the stern. “I think we can get it rolling now that it’s out.”
“Over there beyond the barn will be fine,” Samuel said.
Annie, Hattie, and Birdie set out supper in the locust grove. The wind was light, the air dry and warm. The men washed up and joined them.
“Maybe the dust is all finished with,” Hattie said. “It feels like a fresh start, doesn’t it? Today is as bright as Christmas. Wouldn’t that be wonderful, if it went back to how it was and we could forget all about that terrible dirty time?”
“It would, Miss Daniels,” Samuel said.
Annie didn’t sit to eat, moving back and forth from the house with pitchers and platters. Birdie stayed in the kitchen, happy to wash dishes away from the chitchat.
“He did it,” Birdie said.
Annie wiped her hands on her apron and leaned for a moment against the icebox.
“He did it,” she said.
“Do you ever hope the flood actually does come? Even a little bit?”
It would prove Samuel not crazy. It might save the land. It would change the way she thought about God.
“I wouldn’t wish for destruction like that,” she finally said.
“It would change everything,” Birdie said. “It’s always the same around here. Everything just goes on like always.”
“Well, not quite like always,” Annie said, nodding to the baby, with the slightest flash of a smile.
* * *
TWO NIGHTS LATER, the sky lit up with jagged flashes, thunderheads bunched and boomed, nearing from the north. Samuel rubbed his chin and watched from the porch. This certainly was rain, and the wheat was already a little ahead of where it had been last year. Lord, Lord. The boat, with its flat bottom, sat sound where they had set it down, visible when the lightning streaked the darkness. Bring the rain, he thought. Let it come.
Annie and Birdie, unable to sleep through the growing rumbling, soon joined him, and the three of them heard the rain start, thwonking against the wood of the boat. And then, as if a giant bucket had been tipped, the rain fell in torrents. Samuel stuck his hand out and it felt like nails against his skin. Water pooled on the still-droughted ground, running down the eroded grooves. It sounded like a freight train, the downpour deafening. And it kept coming, hard and fast, covering the dirt first in puddles and then in streams. Thunder cracked and Birdie scampered back toward the door, but Annie held fast beside him, the wind whipping her nightgown.