At Christmas, there were arguments. The flat line of his grandma’s mouth, a hyphen of anger. “I am not a child,” she’d said as his parents and Aunt Debbie sighed and cut their Christmas ham and passed the crescent rolls and mashed potatoes. He’d looked at Travis, thinking, Say something, you’re the one they want to hear. But his brother just shrugged. Mal might have spoken up, but she wasn’t there. He’d hated everyone at the table then except for his grandma. Across the plate of ham, she met his eye. Kept the frown on her face. But just for him, something no one else saw—she winked.
In the house, they’re closing windows; outside, they’re starting cars. He puts the keys in his pocket. At dinner, he decides, he’ll give them back to his grandma. But it turns out that with everyone around, there’s never a good moment, and besides, he likes thinking he has something that no one else knows about. A testament to his grandma’s refusal to give in. At the end of the night, he hugs her good-bye without returning them.
Next time, he thinks.
And when that time comes, it’s next time again.
Years later, on one of Travis’s frequent trips back from St. Louis to see his parents and brother—who continue on against the odds in the same ranch-style house, the same old town, after the night when Jesse, a fifth of cheap vodka in his belly, climbed the scaffolding on the side of the old high school and fell backward onto concrete—he decides to drive out to see his grandmother’s old place.
Out 143 there’s a big hill he used to jump, and then a soft right onto Fox Road, winding out among the cornfields.
Hazel has been dead for a decade and it’s been that long, too, since he saw his aunt or cousin. There are phone calls. Twice a year or so, his father hears from Debbie, who has married a tech entrepreneur and moved out to California. Plane tickets are talked about, but never purchased. And Mal? Mal is good, Mal is somewhere in the world, never the same place. Though after Africa, not such exciting places as you might have expected: Ann Arbor, Cincinnati. She is gathering degrees in subjects for which there is no identifiable job market. Or so Travis’s dad tells him, in somewhat different words.
He turns onto Sumner and in the near distance is the big house with the silo and barn where the Hughes family lived—friends of his dad’s when he was young. Down a bit farther are the new developments, ugly beige and brick houses for people who work in town but want to live in the country. Satellite dishes on every roof. Three-car garages. When Travis asked his brother if he wanted to come along, Jesse shook his head, staring at the television from his motorized wheelchair. Fucked up, he muttered, what it’s turning into out there.
He makes the final turn onto the straight stretch, train tracks under his tires for just a moment. The land is flat and the corn is still low, so he can see in the distance the slight rise, almost a hill, where the house had been. It’s gone now, along with the barn and septic tank, the fence and all the trees. He’d known the house was razed, but he hadn’t realized the place would look like this: so ordinary and blank. Level with all around it. He had thought he might want to get out and walk around, but why walk through a cornfield? The sky is bigger than he remembered it, great white clouds lumbering through the blue, and the corn is pretty in the most ordinary of ways: green stalks, black earth. Zipping down the asphalt, he’s quickly past the place where the house used to be. Past it and gone. A car is a beautiful thing in the country. Straight down the middle. He rolls down the windows and smells manure. It’s spring, and because he’s not a farmer and never has been, he feels only the poetry in it, and none of the work.
Louisa
1
March 17, 1892
Dear Louisa,
This country has offered up a number of surprises over the years, but here’s one to beat them all: it rained mud here yesterday. Actual mud coming down from the sky, a grayish-brown sludge that stuck to the buildings and covered everything. We were all inside the house when it happened, but Li K’ang had gone to the market in search of fresh vegetables and when he came back he looked like some sort of monster that had crawled up from the bottom of a lake, covered from head to foot in mud and slime, and his two eyes shining white out of an equally dirty face. He was laughing about it and not at all alarmed. It happens here from time to time, he says, though not all that often. Certainly such an event hasn’t come in the last few years—I should think I would have remembered it! But I suppose it’s no wonder with the climate here in the north: dust upon dust, and wind upon wind. The one gets hold of the other and makes us all miserable. At least mud raining down makes for a good story.
Other than strange weather events, we are all well. Freddie is toddling around faster every day, and the bigger I get, the harder it is for me to chase after him. This time around has been harder than it was with him; I have to spend part of each day in bed resting. Don’t be alarmed, Louisa, it’s nothing serious, but I did think it was supposed to be easier the second time. Luckily I have Hsi-yung helping. She came before for a short time, you remember, last year. I like her; she’s a quick, smart girl with a sparkle in her eye and it’s easy to tell that she’s used to caring for small children. Well, she has one herself, though it’s not with her here; I guess she’s left it at home for someone else to care for.
We’re still waiting on the mail package, and I do hope there will be some letters from you when it arrives. It’s been nearly six weeks since the last came, and that one had your letters from Christmas and New Years. Now you must be busy planting, I think. Let’s see: beets and peas and radishes, of course, as well as spinach and broccoli and onions and carrots. I’m sure you have other news to tell me, but if nothing else, then simply give me a list of all you are planting and let me imagine the meals you will prepare when it comes in. For now, I suppose you’re getting to the bottom of the cellar and pretty ready for spring, like we are here.
I am eager for more news of you and Bert, and all the folks back home as well, assuming that you’ve heard from them more recently than I have. But I am always ready for letters from all. You and I are the two prodigal daughters, Louisa, and must look to each other for confirmation that we have made the right choice in leaving a loving home for the more dubious comforts of the wider world.
Much love, of course, from Owen and Freddie, even if Freddie doesn’t know he has wished it. I’m locked up in the house now for the next two months, and not able to do much of anything but read and write, so you can count on receiving plenty of letters from
Your loving sister,
ADDIE
So they all went. The letters were written in a small, neat hand that covered every last inch of space on the page, front and back. Over the years, this was how Louisa would come to think of her sister: as an elegant scrawl like frost on glass. She’d look for Addie not only in the words themselves but in the shape of the letters and the spaces between them, the odd curl at the top of the lowercase d, the o that never quite completed itself. She’d take comfort in the fact that the handwriting looked the same from month to month and from year to year.
For the first year or two, the letters arrived at intervals of eight to twelve weeks. They would come tied up all together in a packet, a month or more of writing that chronicled the adventures her sister was having as a missionary all the way over on the other side of the world, and that put a check on Louisa’s thinking of her own life as containing very much excitement. True, her situation was new as well—marriage and a move five hundred miles west to become a farmer, or a farmer’s wife. She and Addie had been raised in a fine two-story house in eastern Ohio, two daughters in a family of six, and the family name well respected in town, so for some little while every aspect of life on the farm had felt like an adventure. She had never milked a cow before, never rendered lard. Back in Marietta, she had helped her mother and the hired girl to make jams and pickles, to mix up catsups and to can a variety of vegetables. She knew the elementals of keeping a house clean.
But the house in town was something very different from t
he one-room cabin she and Bert lived in on the farm. When she first saw their new home, she’d turned to his chest and wept. He had comforted her then: Come now, Lou, it’s not as bad as that. Maybe it wasn’t so bad if you were used to such living. Well, she would grow used to it. The cabin had a packed-earth floor and no ventilation for the stove except through one of the two small windows. One of the first improvements they made was to carve out a hole in the ceiling and move the stove to the room’s center. They put wood planks over the floor, and one of the neighbors brought them a rag rug she’d made. A wedding present, she said, flicking her eyes sideways in apology. The gift had made Louisa so happy she lunged forward to grab the woman’s hands, kicking over a stool and alarming everyone—herself included, when she felt the calluses on Mrs. Moeller’s fingers and palms. “You are simply the kindest,” she said, brushing the hardened skin with a kind of morbid fascination. Her own hands were still smooth. They wouldn’t stay that way.
Bert bought some wood from their neighbors, and together they constructed an outhouse. Then they built a henhouse and filled it with chickens. With the leftover boards, Louisa tacked up some extra shelves in the cabin and used them to display what Bert called her “historicals”: a variety of fossils and arrowheads they’d found in the soil. She liked thinking that the land had been other things to other people before they were here. Bert said he didn’t think she would have liked it so well if those other people were still here, and she supposed he was right.
They’d arrived late in the season, too late for planting, and the acres were not yet theirs to farm; they made up a parcel of land belonging to their nearest neighbor, who was moving into town after the season had done. After the outhouse and henhouse were completed, it was harvest time, and Bert went out every day as a paid hand while Louisa went to the neighbors’ to help cook for the men. From the women she learned how many bushels of corn they could expect to get from their acres next year, and how little they would be paid for them, as prices had been falling steadily for a decade and continued to go down. From Bert she learned that none of this mattered; as long as they worked hard, they would do just fine.
Back home, she’d been used to reading novels for at least an hour in the evening, either by herself or with Addie. Now, she and Bert went to bed when the sun went down. She would rub his back to soothe his muscles after a long day’s work with Prince in the field. Sometimes they’d speak of what had gone on in their separate days, but after spending hours with the neighbors, Louisa was happy not to talk. The silence in the cabin had a thickness to it, a kind of slow swirl. She floated in it; she sank. There was her body, which was a single thing, and there was her husband’s body in its various parts—the shoulders and arms that she kneaded and pushed and beat into comfort, and the skin, sticky with dried sweat, whose combination of vinegar and hay was, to her, the most magnificent scent in the world. The heart, whose slow beat pulsed strong in his neck. Often she would drape herself over him, press her chest to his back, and then he would turn around and grab hold of her and give her love quickly.
She was not often alone, but she missed her family. The letters from Addie had not yet begun to arrive and though her parents wrote her, and her sister Flora, too, she longed to see a face that looked like hers. They didn’t even have a mirror in the cabin; perhaps that made it worse. They didn’t have a mirror as they didn’t have many other things that would have made her more comfortable, things she might have thought about if she’d had more time to plan. She was sixteen years old and everything had happened so swiftly. In the neighbors’ kitchens, she told her story: how her father had handled the will for Bert’s uncle, and when that uncle died, the big black-haired German with clumsy hands and a broken nose had been invited for a cold dinner on a very hot day. Bert was in town for two weeks, and by the end of it, he had an inheritance and an understanding with Louisa. He went back to Illinois to secure the purchase of the farm; a month later he returned and they had a wedding dinner at the house and the very next day boarded a train headed west. Her parents had come to the station to see her off, and her brother Will and sister Flora and a whole crowd of aunts and uncles and cousins. It was the same group that had seen Addie off just two months before.
She told her story, and the women said wasn’t Bert a prize, wasn’t Louisa a sweet thing, wasn’t her sister a brave soul for going off to save those poor heathens who had never heard the name Jesus. They would get the church to take up a collection.
At night Louisa turned to the photographs she’d brought with her from back home. She wanted to check her memory, to make sure she had not already forgotten faces. In addition to her wedding portrait, she had two earlier pictures taken of her family in the studio a year or two before Addie left: one of the family, and one of the three sisters. But they were artificial and flat; there was almost nothing of them there. What was Addie? Only the squarish face, all cheeks and forehead, and the long rectangular nose. The eyes looked too light, the face stripped of expression.
Louisa tried to conjure up other elements, the way her sister walked, the sound of her laugh, but the memories slipped out of her grasp. A quick flash, as if Addie, galloping by on a horse, had turned just for an instant to look at her. There—that was her sister, wasn’t it? But when Louisa tried to draw up the idea again, it dissolved, and she wasn’t sure that she’d gotten any of it right at all.
It was winter when she finally received the first packet of letters. This was her first winter in Illinois, and the house, tiny and cramped, was closing in on her. Bert assured her that the weather had been mild so far, which was little comfort when the wind came howling through the cracks in the walls and the snow came swirling down and she grew convinced that their cabin was just a tiny candle flame in a deep and immense darkness. She wondered, as she untied the first bundle of letters, if it was this cold in China. Did they get snow there? It wasn’t like Australia, was it, where the seasons were reversed—winter in July and summer in January?
She didn’t get an answer to her question because that batch of letters only went as far as early autumn. There were letters from the train, letters from the ship, and from every stop along the way once they hit solid ground. She would read all of them many times and in every possible order, including the natural one. But the first time through, she began with the latest.
September 30, 1890
Dear Sister,
This is my first letter from Lu-cho Fu, so I will attempt to make it a good one as this will have to serve as your introduction to our new home. If you were here in the flesh, I would invite you to our housewarming; or perhaps I should say if you were here I would have a housewarming because there’s no one to invite but the Riddells, and it would be silly to have a party in which the guests only just outnumber the hosts. The Riddells are a family of five and Owen and I feel quite lucky to have them here. Mr. Riddell rode out on a mule to meet us as we came down into the town and if it’s possible to know that you will like someone when you first see them from a distance of one hundred yards, then that is exactly what happened. We were twelve days altogether crossing the mountains in our litter—nine days to T’ai-yüan, and then the better part of three days going down to Lu-cho Fu—and that’s after spending a week in Pao-ting Fu and nearly as long coming downriver from T’ien-chin.
You can imagine how dusty and tired and jostled we were, and how glad to see a friendly face beaming at us from down the road. I didn’t even wonder how it was that Mr. Riddell knew we were arriving just then, but we learned later it was a happy coincidence; he was out on the street and heard two locals gossiping about “wai-kuo jen,” which, you may guess, is how the Chinese refer to us. I’ve learnt almost nothing else of the language, but I will have plenty of time to study soon, once my state becomes visible and I am locked up inside.
So her sister was pregnant. Louisa felt it as a metal splinter in her heart: Addie was going on into motherhood without her. She herself had felt, as soon as she arrived at the little house with Bert,
that she wanted a child to tie her to the place, to make her a still point on that expanse of land that undulated—wavered—as it stretched toward the horizon. But so far she had had only a hope and then a loss.
Instinctively, she put a hand to her stomach, and it growled as if to show that food was its only concern. Bert was at the stove, frying mush. They had bought the cornmeal and butter and were lucky to have it, but the butter always tasted of ash, no matter what Louisa did to try to keep it apart from the stove. “Put some honey in,” she said with a frown, and Bert reached for the jar while Louisa kept reading:
The house—well, suffice it to say that it is nothing like what we are used to. There is a central courtyard and a smaller one in the back, and walls all around that are ten or twelve feet high. The rooms all open up off the courtyards, so that you can’t move from room to room without going outside. I am not certain how we will like that in the rain, but for now we don’t mind it. However, we are told that it almost never does rain here, and after riding twelve days through dusty yellow mountains, on paths that had cracks six inches deep and two inches wide, I can believe such a thing is true. The advantage is that this gives us a ceiling of bright blue sky over our house, which is rather cheerful. Certainly better than a raincloud.
So here we are in our new home, and we are settling in. The quarters we’ve been given are quite large and outfitted with all the necessities. I guess the folks at the Missionary Board arranged the purchase of the place, and the Riddells took it upon themselves to buy linens for the beds, as well as a few basic goods for the kitchen, baskets and a cleaver and a few heavy earthen jars that they say we can use for pickling. They also found two boys to work for us. Three dollars a month will suffice to pay them, Mrs. Riddell tells me, which I suppose is good enough wages in China.
Rebellion Page 3