Hope on the Plains

by Linda Byler

  “You have to slow them down, Manny,” Sarah called hoarsely.

  He nodded. “Klassermans?” he croaked.

  “They’re closest.”

  Owen and Sylvia were deep in their first slumber of the night when Owen dreamed there was a woodpecker talking to him, his mouth in a smile, telling Owen he’d better check the front door soon. He woke with an unnamed dread and a cold chill, aware of his wife’s soft hand shoving at his shoulder and saying, “Owen. Owen. Owen.”

  He swung his legs down from the high bedstead, his feet scrabbling for the stool he used to get in and out of bed. He missed it and fell hard on his hands and knees, a whoosh of air and a grunt pushing from his mouth.

  “Ach, Owen. Get up.” Sylvia, talking to him from the folds of warm blankets. Fumbling for his trousers, he placed one pink foot into an opening and jammed his toes into a pocket before untangling himself and trying again. The knocking was louder and faster now.

  Muttering, he let himself out the bedroom door, wondering if he should grab the rifle or what. Such a pounding on his front door!

  His eyes stretched enormously to see the blackened huddle in front of him. The story came tumbling out in swift sentences, sending Owen to the telephone to call the fire department and all the surrounding neighbors. He held the mouthpiece and yelled into it, the dim electric bulb from the ceiling making the desperate group appear more burned and terrified.

  Sylvia appeared in her fluffy pink housecoat, her eyes popping then streaming with tears of pity. She couldn’t help but think of the time spent on her hands and knees wiping the linoleum on the floor, and now here it was, covered with black soot. They smelled terrible, just terrible. But ach.

  The wind confused them after days of silence. It moaned and sighed in the cold night and tore at the corner of the roof where the downspout wasn’t fastened properly. It whistled around the corner of the porch, lifted the door mat and folded it in half, sent a half-dozen barn cats scurrying for cover.

  Back at the homestead, it whipped the burning grass into a fury of heat and light. The flames danced across the plains, eating away at the dry, unpainted logs of the buildings. It licked greedily now, gulping wood and mortar, growing hotter and hotter as the wind rose in strength, riding before the storm that had been lurking in the gray bank of clouds for days, waiting to unleash its pent-up power.

  The work of Mose Detweiler’s hands was ravaged, gobbled up in less than an hour by the raging inferno, whipped by the oncoming storm. There was no one to observe, no one to record the actual time.

  The fire engines arrived clanging, but by now the fire had spread wider and was completely out of control. Telephone wires crackled with the news until the poles went down, annihilated along with everything else in the fire’s path.

  The laying hens cackled and squawked as they ran before the wall of fire with the gophers and rabbits and prairie hens. The milk cow ran clumsily, her poor udder swinging and her eyes wide with terror until she succumbed to the power of the smoke and heat, like every other living thing in its wake.

  When the ice and freezing rain started, appearing as wet splotches the size of dimes, driven sideways and slanting against the night sky, pelting the house’s sturdy German siding, they all thought it was only the wind increasing. But soon they realized what the sound against the glass window panes was.

  Manny’s face lit up, the hope burning in eyes so like his father’s, believing, with faith like a rock, that his prayers were answered. The homestead would be saved, there was no doubt.

  Sarah turned her head and saw the ice and cold rain sluicing down the window panes. She silently calculated the distance between the windmill and the buildings and was afraid to hope.

  Hannah stood still and listened. Bitter. Too late, likely. So much for God helping you out. And yet, for a fleeting instant, she hoped.

  The freezing rain and the wind turned into a maelstrom of sight and sound, pounding against the north side of the house, then the south. The wind shrieked and roared. The cold deluge clattered against the windows, flung on the house as if giant arms were throwing it.

  Eli held both hands to his ears, palms sweaty with panic and little boy agitation. “Mam, Mam,” he whimpered, his black eyes like wet coals.

  Mary went to him and held him in her thin arms. She stroked his shoulder and said, “It’s only rain, Eli. And wind. Yusht da vint.”

  Owen sat at the kitchen table, his round face sober, his eyes glinting in the electric light. Sylvia was in the closet, rummaging for clothes for Sarah and the two oldest children. They smelled bad. She could hardly breathe.

  She filled the claw-foot tub with hot water from the spigot, the stopper to the drain attached with a small chain. She gathered clean towels, a bar of soap, washcloths, and two flannel nightgowns she had outgrown. Holding one up to her shoulders, she shook her head in disbelief. Had she really been that small once?

  Back at the homestead, the wind whipped the fire into a hellish frenzy, its power growing until it could gobble up anything in its path. The greedy blaze devoured acres of dry grass, reducing it to flat, black ash that left little puffs of gray smoke and white dust whirling away into the night.

  When the thunderous black clouds finally unleashed their pent-up rain and hailstones, the sky poured unlike anything the huddled ranchers had ever seen, and they thought they’d seen everything.

  In only a few hours, the out-of-control burning turned the land into a black, stinking, mushy slime dented with ice pockets, hailstones sizzling and steaming in seconds. The clattering ice and rain made hissing and spitting sounds as it fell on the raging flames, firing shoots of white steam toward the roiling black sky.

  Ranchers and firefighters stood by their various forms of transportation until the power of the deluge sent them inside. Hail bounced off metal rooftops and windowpanes, and the torrents of icy rain made driving impossible.

  The flattened brown grass bent to the onslaught. The cracked earth took on piles of ice and water sluiced into the broken, parched soil. The rain was too late for the crops, but it restored the water table beneath the grass.

  Years later, the ranchers would speak of the fire, the sizzling and steaming clouds of it that people spotted as far away as Pine. The storm had saved them all. Hard telling where the fire would have stopped had the rain not come. They would have needed to dig trenches to save ranch buildings. Stretched to the limit by the local gossip, the night of the storm was told and retold, around dinner tables, in church yards, and in cafés and bars. Hashed and rehashed, until it was chewed to a pulp.

  At the Klassermans, Sarah lay in the clean guest bed that Sylvia had made, little Abby held snugly in her arms. She was exhausted. Weary beyond anything she had ever experienced. The muscles in her arms burned with the extended force and movement of the wet feed sacks that had pushed her to her limits and beyond. Her legs ached and felt like stumps. Her lips were numb, scorched by the heat and smoke. Her face was chapped and dry. She reached up to feel the lashes on her eyes and eyebrows and was met with smooth, hairless skin.

  She cried, then, hot scalding tears of hopeless despair, the loss of her eyebrows the final shove that sent her headlong into a chasm of anguish. She drew up her knees as she whimpered and sobbed, stuffing a fist against her mouth to keep from waking Abby.

  The rod of God’s chastening had fallen hard, more than she could bear. What had she done to deserve this? Must one person reap what another had sowed? When she became Mose’s wife, they had become one. Was punishment meted out bit by bit to her as an accomplice in Mose’s follies?

  She squeezed her eyes together, moaning softly with the pain and humiliation. She had followed him, this wild land an anchor for his dreaming. Footloose, unstable he was. Oh, he was.

  The future loomed, a bitter cup. Sarah’s family could not be expected to come forward yet again. All Sarah and the children had were two worn-out horses, a rusted wagon that jiggled, clothes that reeked of fire and smoke, a few quilts, and she hoped
, a handful of bewildered cattle that had been bought with her father’s money. She prayed to keep from blaming Mose. She prayed that God would purge her heart and show her the known and unknown sins she coveted. Vissa adda unvissa. To be beaten back time after time, surely God was showing her something about her life—a wrong, a sin, a rebellion.

  In the adjacent guest room, Hannah lay with Mary and Eli beside her on smooth and spotless sheets smelling of lavender and mothballs. The quilts pressed her ravaged body into the mattress.

  She was bone tired. She could be dead the way her body felt, but she guessed that as long as her heart was beating and her lungs were breathing, she was still alive, so that was something.

  Stupid old gas engine. That Ben Miller didn’t install it right. Probably Ike Lapp did it. One spark, two or three, whatever. If the storm had arrived even a few hours earlier, the buildings would have been saved. She railed against God about how the Higher Power handled what she couldn’t control. But her sensitivity to sin and wrongdoing steered her away from blaming the family’s misfortune on God.

  Well, all right then; here is what it was. The homestead was a soupy black mess that smelled worse than Sodom and Gomorrah. One windmill. Some frightened cattle. Two horses and a wagon. Everyone safe. They’d need to make a phone call to Lancaster. Her grandfather’s neighbor could find him and bring him to the house.

  News would spread. The biggest hurdle, as Hannah saw it, was going to be her own mother’s need to return to the safety of Lancaster County. To persuade her to start over was the closest thing to an impossibility Hannah had ever encountered. Who could do it?

  An iron fist closed around Hannah, the will to stay and start overflowing in her veins, revitalizing her fatigue. She envisioned a new house, long and low, a real ranch house, a barn, the grass lush and green and waving; the cattle fat and black, multiplying like rabbits, being driven to Dorchester where the auctioneer’s gavel crashed down on the highest prices.

  Everyone would know the superiority of the Bar S brand. Somehow, she needed to procure another loan. First thing in the morning she’d make that telephone call without Sarah knowing about it.

  CHAPTER 3

  The cold came with determination, riding in on the wake of the storm a month earlier than usual. It came at night, freezing a lid of ice on the cow’s water tank and coating the crumbling dry grass with hoarfrost resembling sugar crystals. The dry creek beds welled with turgid brown water that seeped into the cracked, parched earth and left slabs of thin brown ice along its banks that looked like torn slabs of moldy bread.

  The cows grew winter coats and stood hunched against the cold, their eyes slashes in their faces, warding off the frost. Acres and acres of burnt prairie grass froze to a blackened permafrost, a sort of nighttime Arctic, someone’s overwrought imagination come to life.

  Owen and Sylvia kept them all safely tucked in the warm ranch house, the fire burning and crackling cheerily in the two wood stoves. As news of the fire spread, farmers and townspeople bearing bags of clothes and boxes of pans and plates, glasses, knives and forks, blankets and towels stopped at the Klassermans in their chugging cars and trucks.

  Hannah made the phone call home, relating the events, her voice strong and without emotion. The word spread quickly, ears bent toward the shocking news. That poor Sarah. They shook their heads, clucked their tongues. Hadn’t the poor woman had enough? Ei-ya-yi. And they stepped forth. They couldn’t blame hard times. In the time of tragedy, you gave freely, never questioning. Give and it shall be given unto you, packed down and flowing over.

  And they did. The relatives gathered clothing and furniture. Some gave money. Samuel Stoltzfus, Sarah’s father, sat at his kitchen table with tears flowing silently down his face, glistening in his white beard, the humble gratitude overflowing.

  Jeremiah Riehl was shoeing a horse for a customer, Henry Esh, the horse leaning all his weight on the hoof tucked between his knees. Henry kept up an endless volley of local news peppered with gossip. Jerry’s shoulders burned with the strength needed to keep the hoof intact. He was tired of listening to Henry’s blather, and this horse was about the most contrary creature he’d shod all week.

  He heard North Dakota. Immediately, he let go of the hoof, straightened his back and stared at Henry, his dark eyes intense.

  “Yeah, burned up. They say there’s nothing left. Burned up the house and barn. They say it wasn’t much to begin with. That Mose Detweiler was an aylend. They say his wife will come back now, but the oldest daughter won’t. Ray Miller said the only reason they’re out there is because of her. She’s something else. Must be like her old man. You know they say it rained so hard the fire was out in five minutes. Five minutes! I guess the way it sounds the weather out there is hardly to be trusted.

  “So I don’t know what’s gonna happen. Old Samuel Stoltzfus is getting ready to go out again. Folks are giving things, and he’ll probably end up with a railroad car load of stuff.”

  He stopped and went over to the open barn door to send a stream of tobacco juice into the crisp November air.

  “Weddings going full sing, right now. Don’t you think you better start courting someone? You’re not getting any younger.”

  Jerry didn’t hear that part of Henry’s string of words. He was still thinking about North Dakota. About Hannah. “So how’d this fire start?” he asked.

  Henry roared and slapped his knee. “Boy, you’re a slick one! Avoid talking about what I just said.”

  Henry took his leave, driving the newly shod horse and leaving Jerry in a fuzzy state, his mind hundreds of miles away, out on the plains of North Dakota. He didn’t understand his need to go and see for himself what had actually occurred, to see for himself what they had come through. Mostly, though, he wanted to see Hannah.

  Was she suffering? Broken down? Where was the family staying? How could he go without raising suspicion?

  When he heard of a group of men and boys going to help rebuild, he put his name in. He met the raised eyebrows of his sister and her husband with a bland questioning look, one of innocence, so that she told her husband perhaps there was nothing to her wondering if Jerry had been attracted to Hannah that day she had been caught in the rain. After all, it wasn’t unusual for a young man to get the fever to go West. Not unusual at all.

  Emma wanted to go. She felt she could persuade her sister to come back and live a decent life among God-fearing Amish instead of yoking herself to the world. Those western heathen were no good for the family, especially that Hannah.

  Samuel said point blank there was no work for the women until the house was up. Emma blew up, enraged at her father for even thinking of helping them rebuild. What in the world was wrong with him? If Sarah planned on staying out there for Hannah’s sake well, then, she was going to wash her hands of the whole affair, and she certainly hoped he wasn’t too generous in his giving.

  Samuel told his daughter in a patient, even tone that no, he wasn’t too generous; other folks had given so much that he believed he’d need most of one railroad car to take it all.

  Sylvia Klasserman had a minor breakdown that resulted in the neighbors erecting a sort of shack to house the family while they worked on rebuilding.

  Sylvia was from an old aristocratic German family and was given to extreme cleanliness, a way of life that decreed that certain jobs be done on certain days. Washing on Monday, ironing on Tuesday, and so forth. Her washing was done in her Maytag wringer washer, rinsed twice, once in vinegar water and once in water containing blueing, her whites so white they shone blue. She ironed everything, even her bed sheets and Owen’s underwear. Every six weeks she took down her white curtains and washed them, rinsed them in blueing, and ironed them. She washed walls and floors and furniture. She scoured the claw foot bathtub and the small sink beside it.

  Her bread baking was done on Wednesday, her pie baking on Thursday. All her belongings had a place and were always in it or on it. Cast iron frying pans were hung by size, her turners and spatu
las in certain compartments in certain drawers. When the tin of lard was brought out of the pantry, it was never returned before a good washing with soapy water.

  When her immaculate house received two children and a baby, it scrambled all her ingrained priorities. The laundry was washed haphazardly, the ironing not even close to her specifications, not to mention the cleaning and dish washing.

  And oh, that baby!

  Sylvia didn’t want to be this way. She wanted to relax and give over for the dear homeless family. But in the end, she just couldn’t do it.

  Abby Jenkins snorted and shook her head. She invited the family to stay at the Jenkins ranch. But Sarah declined; it would not be proper with Hannah’s attraction to Clay.

  When Owen and Hod got a group of locals to help construct a temporary dwelling where the family could live there while the building was going on, Sylvia did her best to hide her pent-up frustration until the glad day when they all moved out of her house.

  The temporary dwelling was a shack, nothing more. Sarah shook her head at the irony of it. Here she was, back to where they began and probably with even less. All around them lay the blackened land. A dark desolation, the stark windmill creaking and spinning endlessly, the gray sky above it like pewter.

  They had a good cookstove, and for this she was grateful. They made their beds on the floor each evening, but she was thankful for the heavy blankets and quilts. They made due with a rickety old table and chairs and clothes packed in cardboard boxes.

  They carried their water from the tank, heated it in the agate canner, and used it to wash dishes and clothes. The rough planks that served as flooring were soon covered with black ashes and soot. It was everywhere. There was no way to avoid it. The land surrounding the dwelling was scorched and blackened, the gray skies and the cold prohibiting any new growth.

  The cattle stayed on the prairie where the fire had been stopped by the storm. They found sustenance in the dry brown grass and for water made their way to the tank, where Hannah or Manny faithfully broke away the rim of ice.