Hope on the Plains

by Linda Byler

  They came up on the squat brown and weathered house, the dark smoke curling toward the ominous sky. Without speaking, their pace increased, anticipating the warmth of the cookstove, secure from the cold. They clattered up on the porch and yanked the door open to the smell of simmering chicken potpie, the children’s chatter like birdsong, and the sound of Sarah’s low singing at the table, where she sat darning a pair of stockings.

  Sarah served them the chicken potpie in deep bowls of stone ware, and sides of applesauce and spicy red beets. She frowned when Hannah lifted her spoon and began to eat without the usual bowing of her head, eyes closed in silent prayer. Manny sat waiting.

  Sarah reminded Hannah to pray before eating. After a whoosh of impatience and a shrug of her shoulder, she folded her hands and dipped her head, Manny following suit. They ate quickly, shoveling the hot food into their mouths, shaking their heads to cool their tongues when too much heat produced quick tears.

  Hunger, or the sating of it, was not a matter taken lightly. “Why’d you kill a chicken?” Hannah asked after she wiped her bowl with a bread crust and jammed the whole piece into her mouth.

  “I didn’t. It’s canned chicken from Doddy Stoltzfus’s cellar.”

  Hannah raised her eyebrows and kept her comment to herself. Sarah lifted the cover on the cookstove, added two sticks of wood, and squinted at the billowing smoke before replacing the lid.

  Eli played with blocks of wood and tiny bundles of grass tied with string, building a barnyard and feeding imaginary cattle. Mary pushed the wooden wagon, loaded the bundles of grass and took them across the floor, making galloping noises as she imagined a team of horses.

  “Winter’s coming,” Eli piped up. “Better get more hay, Mary.”

  Abby crawled fast, wrecked the barn, and scattered the hay with baby squeals. Eli jumped to his feet, his hands grasping her soft, plump waist as he pulled and dragged her back from the cattle ranch. Abby set up howls of protest as she wriggled against the restraint. Hannah slid off her chair, bent to pick her up and held her on her lap, cooing and stroking her back.

  “They should let you play. Mary, why can’t she play with some of your blocks?”

  “We need them.”

  “Our barn needs to be closed in,” Eli chimed in.

  Manny got down on the floor and helped them build a better barn, with blocks left over for a barnyard. He promised to build some cattle for them from blocks of wood with nails for legs.

  “Grass for a tail! Grass for a tail!” Eli shouted, until Sarah held a finger to her lips, shushing him.

  Night fell, darkening the windows with a smear of black. There were no stars, no wind, only the breathless silence. Inside, it was warm, their stomachs were full. Contentment lay in the folds of the white curtains, the simmering of the hot water on the back of the stove, in Sarah’s drooping eyelids as she set cups of sugared tea in front of them. Night was closing in and she was ready to rest, weary with the work of the day.

  Hannah said the engine worked well and the cattle had their fill of water. Now they would not need to worry about calm weather.

  Sarah smiled sleepily, her mind only absorbing a portion of what Hannah was saying. She was thinking of long winter evenings with Mose, the times of happiness in Lancaster County when she was a new bride living in the small rental house at Uncle Levi’s, her husband dark and handsome, their love so perfect and unspoiled, like a delicate rose. His kindness, his loving devotion, everything a man should be. She was blessed beyond measure in those days.

  It was only her absolute devotion to the Bible and the art of submission that had taken her through the dark times that followed. She had not been blind to her husband’s poor management of the family farm, but she felt it was not in her rightful place to assert herself.

  Cows milked late, milk production dropped, and checks in the mail dwindled, leaving unpaid feed bills, horses dying of colic, mold in the grain, and wet alfalfa they should not have been fed. Sarah milked the cows until her arms were numb, her fingers stiff like newly stuffed sausages. And still she milked, trying to ward off the lurking mastitis, the dreaded clumping of the milk, and the blood mixed with the yellowish lumps as it came painfully through the teats.

  When the Great Depression hit, the cows were sold to pay the feed bill. When the price of a good milk cow barely reached one hundred dollars and corn wasn’t worth anything with no livestock to eat it, the slide into losing the farm became inevitable.

  Yet he dreamed and refused to face reality, a cloud of goodwill and a rosy future would appear just around the next bend. They still had five good milk cows, a much smaller feed bill, plenty of hay, and corn to husk.

  The bishop sent the deacon to talk to Mose about unpaid bills and the offer of allowing men into their house to “Go over the books,” in his words. In his courteous manner he spoke of this being a help to Mose to relieve him of the burden of not being able to meet the monthly payments that were past due. Mose bowed his head, acknowledged that he needed help, and then went out and made his own arrangements. He set up the illegal whiskey still and turned all his grain into the verboten alcoholic beverage.

  He felt despised, stomped on, hunted, and shamed. Excommunicated for this gross ivva drettung, the overstepping of set boundaries, he experienced public shaming to the fullest, his soft heart and easy-going manner wrecked, twisted, and wrung out to a fine pulp.

  Still Sarah remained loyal and supportive. When the men went through their accounts, there was no alternative. The farm had to be sold for much less than it was worth. Mose made frieda, was taken back as a member of the church, his sins forgiven. Then, already, the decline of his good sense had begun.

  Sarah sat, the darning needles clicking, her face serene in the glow of the kerosene lamp. But the dark circles that saddened her eyes into a shade of gray betrayed the pain of remembering, so intense at times that she felt as if she could not bear up beneath it.

  Had she done wrong by being passive? How much could she have prevented?

  Manny looked up from his building of a better farm, his eyes resting on his mother’s, the sadness a common knowledge between them. Manny’s was caused by his zeit-lang, and Sarah’s by the pain of wishing that things had been different.

  Still, she had carried his love and preserved it valiantly, in spite of his shortcomings, and for this, she felt rewarded and redeemed.

  Sighing, she put away the darning needles, folded up the half-finished socks, and set the basket on the side cupboard. Her eyes felt heavy with sleep as she bent and lifted up Abby to wash her face and hands. Confused, she noticed an odd pink glow in her bedroom window. Was there a storm approaching so late in the evening?

  CHAPTER 2

  Sarah’s shaking hands parted the curtains. She strained to see. Her mouth opened, but no sound came from it. Then she called loudly, “Hannah! Manny!”

  The pink glow turned into an orange line, low and wide, in the direction of the windmill.

  The sound of their mother’s voice froze both of them. They knew instantly there was something serious. They fell over each other, rushing to the bedroom. Both of them let out a hoarse, primal scream. Sarah directed as they moved swiftly through the house.

  “Feed sacks. The sacks!” Hannah shouted. Manny burst through the front door, flung himself off the porch, and disappeared into the night, leaving Sarah and Hannah to run toward the dry burning grass surrounding the windmill.

  Eli and Mary held Abby, their eyes large and frightened, Abby reaching toward the front door, wailing and crying for her mother.

  They realized the situation was dire. The line of fire increased too fast to stop. Somehow, they had to reach the tank and immerse the sacks. They had to try.

  Hannah stood at the edge of the fire, the heat sending a hard stab of fear through her sturdy leather shoes and into her stomach, feeding their desperation to stop the fire. The homestead was all they had.

  “The tank. We’ll flog a path through,” Sarah shouted.


  “There’s no wind,” Manny yelled.

  “We can do this,” Hannah ground out between clenched teeth.

  The heat seared the soles of her feet as she dashed through the scattered flames. She saw the breaks in the line of fire, where the cattle hooves had trampled the grass.

  Was there hope?

  She threw the sacks into the tank, prodded them down as the greedy flames licked at the dry grass around them. As Hannah gripped a feed sack with clenched fingers, sucking air through clenched teeth, her nails bent backward, creating a searing pain. She brought it down on the low, crackling flames with a hard whoosh, the flames dying and leaving a black, charred area, stinking smoke and ashes showering them. One area blackened, and the flames leaped out of control in another.

  Clearly, they had created a path to the water tank now. The dash to wet the sacks was possible without wading through a line of fire. The flames died down, only to leap up, hissing, brilliant. The sight of the fire devouring the dry grass banished any hope.

  The night was still, the only sounds the crackling of the burning grass and the wet burlap sacks flogging the orange flames in bursts of smoke and ash. There were no stars or moon, only the canopy of black night sky and the eerie orange glow of the flames.

  How long did they keep throwing those wet sacks around? Hannah didn’t know, couldn’t speculate, her world suddenly turned into a searing nightmare of heat, flame, and the stench of smoke and black ashes.

  She noticed that the burnt grasses turned into bits of white, like tiny worms that appeared for only a second then disappeared. For a fleeting moment, she saw the homestead, its puny buildings tinder dry, gone up in smoke like a blade of grass.

  They became hopeless when the surrounding line of flames grew in spite of the blackened path, the avenue of charred grass mixed with hot dust and dirt.

  Hannah flogged on, beating the earth until her face burnt, her shoulders and arms numb with fatigue. The ever widening area of burned grass was only an unstable victory. She sensed the dancing, licking greediness of the blaze devouring dry grasses so easily, increasing the red and orange flames. Manny’s face was as black as the night sky, with white lines zigzagging along his cheeks where the tears of desperation had fallen. He was like someone gone made, running and flogging with a maniacal speed of despair, a pace he could not hope to keep up.

  Sarah worked grimly, a determination born of panic driving her on. They had to save the buildings. There was hope, in spite of the futility of these wet sacks beating on the flames. She cried out as she saw a new line of fire breaking out toward the direction of the house.

  Dear God, is this your will? Are we simply not meant to be homesteaders? Are we meant to reside among others like us, secure together in body as well as spirit?

  She knew the situation was dire long before Hannah and Manny did. But she figured that, as long as God gave her strength, she would fight on. The path to the tank grew longer and longer, the blaze spreading wider. How long until Hannah saw this?

  She watched her daughter beating and beating, stomping on flames, her skirt charred and blackened, her face a caricature of herself, her hair, coming loose as the pins fell out, surrounding her face in tendrils, like a wild woman. Her eyes were swelling from the heat and smoke.

  Sarah stood still, making raspy sounds as she breathed in and out, her chest heaving, her throat feeling charred and burnt. Taking stock of the situation, the panic rose in her chest, filling her senses. They need to flee, to get away now. She calmed herself, not wanting the children to see absolute abandonment in her need for a headlong dash away from this heat and uncontrollable dry grass. She needed to think and speak rationally.

  “Hannah!” she called loudly, her voice carrying above the sound of the crackling prairie fire.

  Hannah was deaf to her mother’s voice, lost in a world of agony and defiance, her determined nature now leading her to the brink of foolishness.

  Sarah screamed in a high and desperate voice. “Hannah!”

  Manny stopped beating the flames and ran over to his mother, his eyes dark with rings of white in the eerie glow.

  “It’s no use. We can’t do it,” Sarah choked.

  Manny nodded, ran over to Hannah, and yelled in her ear. She elbowed him away and kept up her demented flogging and beating with a gunny sack half eaten away by the flames. She stomped and danced, her head down, her arms outstretched as if the power of her own determination would yet deliver them from this horrible evil.

  Manny grabbed her arm, yelled and pulled her away. She fought him off, the gunny sack flung in his face. She beat his shoulders with her fist, kicked his shins, his legs and feet, screaming hysterically.

  “No! No! Come on, Manny! No! No!”

  Sarah ran and grabbed Hannah by the waist, pulling her away with supernatural strength. Hannah twisted and yelled, shrieking threats and beating the air with her fists. Manny grabbed her kicking feet and held on.

  Without speaking, they gave up the fight. They had all they could do to get Hannah away from the flames. Sarah could not think of what this would do to her daughter, knowing what can happen to a person so unusually determined to be pushed over the brink.

  The thought of her Aunt Suvilla sent shudders of fear through her. They hadn’t known what was wrong. No one did. Put away, they called it. Put away in an insane asylum. Please, please, please. Her pleading came with her gasping breath as she begged for deliverance from so harsh a punishment.

  In the end, their strength gave out. They had to rest. Crying and screaming, Hannah tore out of their grip and took off into the night and the disastrous orange flames. There was nothing they could do but lay spent and gasping, their muscles burning with fatigue. It was only the thought of the terrified children and the need to get away, that roused Sarah and set her on the path of action.

  “Manny!” she panted. “Get the horses hitched. Take the lantern. Bundle the children into their coats. Go. We have to get away.”

  “Will it take everything?” Manny gasped.

  She could not soften the blow. “Yes! Go!”

  She thanked God for Manny’s obedience and began walking in the direction of the fire. “Preserve Hannah’s mind, Lord. Preserve her spirit,” she prayed. Soon enough she saw her, stomping on the flames, as useless as she had ever seen anything. The windmill behind her, the arc of blackened earth, the ever-widening wreath of burning grass and white smoke against the cold, black sky—the hellish scene etched in her mind forever.

  “Hannah!” she screamed. “Hannah!” Sarah went to her, wincing at the heat coming through her skirts and on the soles of her shoes, the fire’s searing brilliance ever powerful, ever increasing. Sarah drew on Hannah’s sleeve, tugged at her skirt, begging, crying, her breath coming in painful puffs of air. “Hannah!”

  The sound of panic in her mother’s voice broke through Hannah’s maudlin stomping. She stood stock still, her dark eyes staring without seeing. Dear God, have I lost my eldest daughter? Suddenly a fierce and undeniable hatred of Mose’s ill-timed journey to North Dakota speared its way into Sarah’s mind.

  She had submitted, had obeyed the whole way, the whole senseless, ridiculous way. She cried and screamed, lifted her face to the dark sky and allowed herself the luxury of regret and remorse. The power to save her daughter from this awful fate fueled the confrontation of who she was.

  To this end, then, she had blindly obeyed. Her screaming broke through Hannah’s sense of shock. With a broken cry, she threw herself down, groveling and clutching Sarah’s blackened skirts, whimpering, a lost sound devoid of courage.

  Sarah bent down and lifted her up. Supporting her with an arm around her waist, she drew her away. Pliant now, her head fallen forward, Sarah guided Hannah with an arm about her shoulders and then around her waist.

  Murmuring half-prayers and half-endearments incoherently, Sarah stopped and turned to kiss Hannah’s cheek. She tasted soot and ashes, and the salt of Hannah’s tears. Broken, they stood together weeping hoars
e sobs of pain and defeat, acceptance and helplessness.

  “Come, Hannah,” Sarah murmured gently. Hannah nodded. And then, in a gesture Sarah would never forget, laid her head lightly on her mother’s shoulder. Dry, hacking sobs and coughs tore from her raw throat.

  “It’ll take the buildings,” she croaked.

  “Yes.”

  Mother and daughter, united now, turned back toward the house, tears mingling with ashes from their a baptism of fire, introducing the uncharted territory of homesteading in the West. So far, determination and the help of family and neighbors had kept them afloat. But from here on, on this terrible night, there was no direction.

  They looked back and saw the ever-widening circle of flames. Spurred on by fear, they ran to the house, stumbling painfully on leather soles half burned away. Up on the porch, they grabbed the little ones, hushing, cajoling.

  What to take? What to leave? No matter. The windows reflected the orange glow. Hurry. Oh, hurry. Will the horses outrun it?

  A high yell from Manny in the direction of the barn. The wind. The wind was getting up. Sarah snatched quilts, blankets, towels, the checkbook, the coins in the crock.

  For what? For what? Blindly they ran out into the night. She felt the wind. Plainly, she heard the distant crackling, the yellowish glow lighting the dark.

  “The chickens! The cow!” Hannah shouted.

  “I let them loose! Manny shouted back, hanging onto Pete’s bridle. Goat snorted, his hooves digging into the earth. Fire terrified horses.

  They threw themselves into the wagon, stuffing quilts under the seats. As Manny let loose, the horses reared and leaped, knocking him onto the seat. He grabbed the reins. The wild dash into the night began.

  Hannah looked back at a wall of crackling orange. The buildings etched in black harbored their belongings—the cookstove, the plank table made by Mose’s own hands, the beds and the washtubs, the dishes and pans. All of it would be devoured by one spark from the new gasoline engine.

  She turned away, the picture of all her hopes and dreams an unbearable vision. She clung to the seat and hung on to Eli, wide-eyed and crying.