—MIRIAM DAVIS COLT
Went to Kansas, Being a Thrilling Account of an Ill-Fated Expedition to That Fairy Land and Its Sad Results (1862)
The six-year-old had been following with fascination the horseman's pursuit of the fleeing calf. He'd roped and missed, and roped and missed again, and as the mortuary's limousine pulled out of the cemetery she squirmed around and got up on her knees to watch from the back window. She had a little girl's love of horses and she'd been riding in a pony club since she was five, but this was another world, a world she knew only from the pages of illustrated books and old American movies. When, on the third effort, the rider finally landed the rope around the calf's neck, she bubbled with excitement and poked her mother's shoulder.
"Maman! Il faut que tu regardes ça!"
"Sit back down and fasten your seat belt," thundered her grandfather.
The little girl turned baffled eyes to her mother, eyes suddenly extinguished of all joy, and with painful remembrance Annette recognized herself in those eyes.
"She's just excited, Dad. She's never seen a cowboy."
"Fasten her seat belt. It's the law."
"We're in a limo in the middle of nowhere. What can happen?"
"Don't argue with me, Annette."
That old anger surged up and began to consume her. Mustn't let it, she thought. Let go of it. We'll be gone soon. She gently resettled the little girl and tightened the belt, pinning her to the dreary boredom of the limousine's interior. Laughter banished, joy crushed.
"I wish you'd teach that child some English," grumbled the old man.
"She knows English, Dad."
"Then why don't you speak it with her? It's just plain rude, always talking in French like that."
"I'm sorry. It's habit." To Eliana she said, "Let's speak English, honey. So your grandpa can understand. Okay?"
"Okay," Eliana said.
Annette didn't like being alone with her father. She feared him. Her mother had always been there, protecting her from his rages and softening his rigid severity with her sweet smile, and now Annette instinctively put her arm around her daughter and drew her closer, and then she felt guilty because her father looked so profoundly sad and isolated on the other end of the wide backseat. So much tension between them. Impossible to ignore it. Coming back here always brought up disturbing emotions; she had thought that by fleeing, she would leave those feelings behind.
She gripped her daughter's hand and stared out the window at the wide expanse of sky and the swiftly scudding clouds, and tears stung her eyes. She couldn't deny the unique beauty of this land, but it also provoked an inexplicable anxiety in her. On the way to the cemetery they had driven past a few ranch houses built out of white limestone rock quarried nearby; these alone had withstood the violent elements throughout the past century. Everywhere else were signs of men and women who had struggled and failed, who had gone on, or back, or just died. Abandoned houses with their plaster walls caved in, their wooden beams splintered and decayed. Abandoned machinery and cars. Abandoned graves.
Two or three weeks, she reminded herself, that would be long enough. Just to make sure her father was squared away. Then they would be on a plane back to Paris. A city circumscribed and fortified, where children played and families strolled in formal fenced spaces; where broad-leaved chestnut trees and beds of lilies and purple wildflowers offered enclosure and security, far away from this terrifying empty space, where there was nothing but prairie forever and ever.
She was always drawn back to this part of the country, obligated and duty-bound because her family was here. Apart from her parents, she never kept in touch with any of them. When her first recordings had been released, she'd received all kinds of congratulatory notes from cousins and the like. Later, when her life had been shattered, when her fame had receded and she'd withdrawn from public view, no longer receiving the international accolades that had been flung at her during her performing years, her warm, well-wishing cousins no longer clamored to see her when she was home, and her family ties narrowed. Only her mother and father bound her to this Wonder Bread–land. And now her mother was dead. There was only her father. She had always hoped he would go first so she could have her mother back again. For years she'd held on to that hope. Now the loss of the illusion was beginning to dawn on her, and she felt like she was mourning something she had always yearned for and would never have.
Chapter 4
The reception at Nell Harshaw's was a strain on Charlie Ferguson. The death of his beloved wife, who had put him at the center of her world, had left him estranged from both man and God. He had never dealt particularly well with death. As a minister, the calls he was obliged to make to families of the deceased were always brief and terse, like Charlie, and buffered with scripture. He would leave them outdated pamphlets about dealing with death, promise his prayers, then hurry away. As a child, Annette assumed this was the way it was done. But when she grew older and moved out of the dark shadow of her father's influence into a world where men of God at times showed great compassion and mercy, she began to wonder why he had ever chosen such a profession. If Charlie was appreciated as a man of the cloth it was not for his sermons, which, like his house calls, were dry and short, or for his sense of humor (he was a sadly humorless man), and certainly not for his selflessness or warmth, but for his ability to raise and invest money for his church. Charlie liked to think of himself as God's business manager. When it came to the material world, Charlie worked miracles. He was a dedicated fund-raiser, an ingenious entrepreneur and a shrewd investor; he refurbished sanctuaries and expanded properties, and still the church coffers grew. The church members recognized this genius in him and so forgave him his inadequacies in the more traditional roles expected of him; they came to hear his dull sermons and prided themselves on how their church was financially sound.
But the people who surrounded him this afternoon were not Charlie's church members. Upon retirement, Annette's parents had left Wichita and moved to Cottonwood Falls, where her mother had been born and raised. The people there knew Charlie only as the man they had seen for the past five years, and so his genius escaped them, and Charlie Ferguson felt very, very alone.
Annette recognized this as she watched him try to mingle with the townsfolk. She saw how he struggled to hold himself together, how he fought back the tears that were so foreign to his eyes, how the muscles in his face were so contorted from the effort that he looked quite unlike himself. She saw how it upset him when Nell Harshaw took Eliana in tow and walked her around the house, introducing her to everyone. The friends and neighbors who gathered that day had never seen Emma Ferguson's one and only grandchild. Nell and the others fawned over her and their eyes followed her around the room. Charlie was ignored, thrown over in his crotchety old age by a little girl who did not at all worship him the way he had always wished his grandchildren would. Indeed, the child was shy and distant with him and always deferred to her mother. He had always been the center of attention, and the woman who had devoted her life to him was gone, and there was no one to replace her.
The entire town of Cottonwood Falls flowed through Nell's modest home that afternoon, bringing enough food to feed a tribe. Eliana fell asleep on Nell's bed, and at the end of the evening they laid her on the backseat of Charlie's car, next to the Pyrex dishes of tuna casserole and the pasta salads and chocolate chip cookies, and drove home.
Annette carried her daughter into the house, got her into her flannel nightgown and tucked her into bed. The room was poorly heated, and Annette removed her sable-collared coat and covered the child. The little girl shivered and pulled the fur collar up around her face.
"It smells like you," she murmured.
"Go back to sleep, precious," Annette said, and kissed her. Eliana opened her eyes.
"Everybody kept staring at it."
"Did they?"
"I heard a man in the kitchen at Nell's. He was making fun of it."
Annette smiled gently and smoothed
back her daughter's hair. "I suppose I shouldn't have worn it here."
"Why?"
"It's out of place."
"You wear it all the time at home."
"Yes, but this isn't home. And I'm sorry that man made you feel uncomfortable. That was not very nice of him."
"I'm glad you wore it. I love it."
"So do I. When I wear it I feel very safe and warm."
"That's the way it makes me feel too."
"Are you sure you want to sleep alone? Wouldn't you rather sleep in my bed?"
"No. I like this room." She snuggled down into the fur collar and whispered, "Tu es si belle, Maman."
Annette kissed her soft cheek, and the child's eyelids closed, and within a few breaths she was asleep.
* * *
Annette took a shower and washed her hair, and with her head under the water she broke down and cried, where no one could hear her. When she finally came out, her father was sitting at the kitchen table, counting out his weekly dosage of vitamins and medication into a pillbox. More than once he dropped a pill into the wrong slot, and then, with trembling fingers, would clumsily try to retrieve it. She noticed how his hands had aged since she'd last seen him. As she pulled up a chair to sit down with him, she accidentally jostled the table and two red pills rolled onto the floor. The lines around Charlie's mouth tightened.
"I'm sorry," muttered Annette as she leaned down, but Charlie impatiently pushed her arm aside and picked up the pills, meticulously dusting off each one with a napkin.
"Floor's dirty," he mumbled.
"Let me help you."
"Are your hands clean?"
"Yes, Dad, my hands are clean."
He told her how many to put in each slot, how many blue ones and white ones and green ones.
"Your mother always got the coffee ready before she went to bed. It's on a timer," he said when they had finished.
Annette prepared the coffee and kissed him good night on his whiskered cheek.
"I love you, Dad," she whispered.
"That doesn't change anything," he said harshly.
She thought she knew what he meant: that loving didn't help the pain. It certainly didn't defeat death.
* * *
For a long time she sat on the edge of her bed in her nightgown, listening to the strange sounds the wind made and hoping it wouldn't wake Eliana. After a while she got up and went down the hall to check on her. Charlie had referred dismissively to this small, cramped room as her mother's sewing room, although the sewing machine had been shunted into a corner and looked as though it hadn't been touched in a long time. Now, it was her mother's upright piano that held pride of place; the keyboard was open and music had been left on the stand as though she might walk in and sit down to play at any moment. Beneath a curtained window was the ruffle-skirted daybed where Eliana now slept. Annette suspected her father never came in here. He must surely have disliked it. It spoke too eloquently of all the things he had tried to crush in his wife, interests and hobbies that had stolen her attention away from him, things he had assumed were gone and dead but that somehow, in later years, had re-emerged with sudden vigor.
The walls and surfaces were covered with photographs of Annette and Eliana, framed press clippings from Annette's performances as solo violinist, photographs of her shaking hands with the Queen of England and the Israeli prime minister. There were postcards Annette had sent from cities around the world, which her mother had proudly framed. There was an old movie poster of Rita Hayworth in Affair in Trinidad that Annette had found in London and mailed to her, although at the time she wondered where her mother would be able to hang it without a prolonged battle with her father, and another she had found in Munich, an equally obscure film of Humphrey Bogart's, entitled Sirocco. Then there were photographs of her mother's idols, the divas Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland and Kiri Te Kanawa, whose voice sounded so much like her mother's had once.
Annette sat on the piano bench in the dark, listening to the wind and thinking of her mother's sweetly scented body lying alone in the cold ground in those lonely hills. Suddenly she was seized with anxiety, and in a flight of morbid fancy she imagined her mother's spirit trapped here. It's this damnable place, she thought. She'd heard stories of earthbound souls, and believed there were many things in the realm of the spirits that we could not know. So she went to her daughter's bed, knelt and hastily crossed herself, then, in a muffled voice, half-aloud, she offered up a single prayer: that her mother's spirit would not be bound to this land; that it would come away with her, away from this place, and be free. She crawled into bed under the blankets and the sable-collared coat and curled up next to Eliana. She found her daughter's hand, soft and warm, and held it in her own.
Annette lay quietly listening to the Kansas wind. When she was a little girl it had terrified her, screeching and moaning around the house at night like a devil from hell, a faceless, deadly wind that could level the land. The white people who settled here had never given it a name: the naming of winds had disappeared with the Indians. She remembered a story she had once read about an aboriginal people shooting at the wind with their guns and beating at it with their brooms, and she thought their behavior wasn't so strange after all.
She tried to sleep but every time she closed her eyes she saw her mother's grave. She wanted to see her alive, coming toward her with her arms open wide, freed from her father's control, free to turn her love elsewhere. Once again came the sad realization that this would never happen. Outdoors the wind rose to a piercing whistle, and she turned her head to look at her daughter, hoping the child wouldn't be awakened. Must get you away from here, precious. Away from these banshee winds. Nothing frightened Annette so much as the thought of being trapped and dying here.
After a while she imagined she was hearing music. It sounded faintly like a Schubert Lieder, one of her mother's favorites. She lifted her head from the pillow and listened carefully, thinking perhaps her father had turned on the radio in his room, but she couldn't locate the source.
The music soothed her and for a moment her grief was lightened. From time to time the wind would halt to catch its breath, and the music in her head would fill the silence. As she drifted off she imagined a presence in the room protecting her and her child from the world beyond, and at last she fell into a deep, dreamless slumber.
Outside the wind dropped, quite suddenly, and the night was cold and still.
Chapter 5
Jerry Meeker could pound in a fence stake with a few blows and bring a stubborn horse under control with a single jerk on the lead, but he was having serious trouble getting a wide leather club chair up the narrow stairs of the Salmon P. Chase House to Ethan's office. Ethan was at the top and Jer was holding up the bottom, straining so hard his face had gone red and his bright blue eyes were swimming in tears.
"Set the damn thing down," gasped Ethan.
"Can't," whispered Jer through clenched teeth.
"Just set it down."
"Keep goin'," grunted Jer.
Ethan took another step, and then another, and finally his heel touched the flat landing at the top of the stairs.
"Okay, buddy, we're here."
"Damn, this's heavy," said Jer as he wrangled his end up to the landing and then collapsed into the chair. "Nice, though." He fingered the brass studs. The leather was very smooth. "Why didn't Tom want it?"
"Didn't have room for it." Ethan wiped his brow with his sleeve. "Come on, let's get it in my office."
"I ain't movin' yet, pal," said Jer.
"You're gonna have to. I'm expectin' that French lady any minute now."
"You mean Emma's daughter?"
"That's right."
Jer rested his head on the chair back and his eyes fell on the plaque that hung next to Ethan's door. Nothing identified the place as a law office; there was only one word—Wordsworth—and below that, a framed quotation by the poet that read:
Where are your books?—that light bequeathed
&nbs
p; To Beings else forlorn and blind!
Up! Up! and drink the spirit breathed
From dead men to their kind.
Jer didn't read much, just an occasional magazine, and he had always found Ethan's office a little strange for an attorney. Inside the spacious attic office were walls of books, many of them having nothing to do with law. It was Ethan's sacred domain, and although Jer didn't understand it, he honored it and held his tongue.
Jer looked down at his stomach. There was a dark blue patch in the middle of his shirt where his sweat had soaked through the denim.
"Well, I guess the sight of me sweatin' like a hog won't make much of an impression on her, will it," he said, slowly getting up. "So I'll move. Just for her sake. Not yours."
"So, I'm supposed to be makin' an impression on Madame, am I?"
"Why didn't you go to the funeral?"
"Actually, I did make an appearance. Sort of."
"What d'ya mean?"
"I'll bore you with it some other time, pal. Come on, we gotta move this thing. You ready?"
"Yeah." Jer squatted and positioned his hands underneath the chair. "She's a mighty pretty lady. You'd like her."
"I doubt it," Ethan said as they lifted the chair together. "She probably has one of those little yappy poodles with bows in its hair."
The office door, which was never locked, swung open as Ethan backed into it. "You doin' okay with your end?" he asked.
"Yeah. Just take it easy," answered Jer.
"Beats me how any relation of Emma Ferguson's can have anything in common with a bunch of little Nazis with no balls," said Ethan as they slowly inched the chair through the doorway. He rambled on, "You remember the time they tried to put French crepes on the menu down at Hannah's? It was on a Saturday night. Old Burt walked in, all spruced up in his good overalls, all clean and pressed, and then he sat down and picked up the menu. He took one look at the Saturday Nite Special and said, 'That goddamn cook's full of crap.' And then he slapped down the menu and walked out. Burt's never been back to Hannah's since."
Firebird (The Flint Hills Novels) Page 2