He glances through the open sliding doors at the piano against the far wall. It commands attention in the living room, presides over it as a sleeping lion would. “You love music,” she says, a statement rather than a question.
He chews on his lip for a moment. “It makes sense to me. And if I’m a good enough piano player, I can compete at the provincial level and win prizes. I want to go to music school after I graduate.”
“The Sichuan Conservatory?”
Indignation pulls his brows together over his nose. “No,” he scoffs, “I want to go to Beijing. The Central Conservatory is the best in the nation, everyone knows that.”
Beijing is several thousand kilometers away to the north, and the national school is an impossible dream. Wei Ke’s parents have power in Heng’an, but it doesn’t extend outside this tiny corner of the country. “You’ve set your sights high.”
“‘The skill is not as great as the heart’s ambition’?” He frowns at the idiom. “Is that what you mean?”
“You’re very good at piano,” Juanlan says carefully. They’ve finished wringing out the clothes, and she leads the way back into the living room. “And I’m sure if you work hard you’ll be able to achieve all your dreams.”
Away from the window, the noise of the rain is softened, and her voice rings unexpectedly loud in the space. Wei Ke sits down at the piano and for a long moment holds his hands just over the keys, the silence a rebuke to her false encouragement. Who is she to talk of dreams? Her own have taken her nowhere. She suddenly wishes that he would slam his fingers down and make a terrible noise, an angry cacophony. He is a child, and such an outburst is allowed.
But when the music comes, it is lively and bright, the notes filling the air like a spill of butterflies. Mozart, perhaps—she isn’t certain. She is only sure that it is music from a different time and place. The notes fly around her, twirling, fluttering. With her eyes closed, she could be far from here. A pause comes, and she pictures the butterflies settling. She holds out a hand, half expecting to feel the music alight on her palm.
Hazel
6
When George and Lydie Hughes came up the drive in their pickup, I was coming out from the barn. I’d been feeding the pigs and thinking how glad I was that the little ones were finally weaned: one of our sows had failed to nurse after she farrowed, and we’d had to bottle-feed her piglets until early October. Only four from the litter had survived. But they were putting on weight, and now that feedings were easy again and I didn’t have to spend so much of my time perched on a stool in the half-dark, cradling a piglet in my lap, I felt almost the same as I had a couple months before when Debbie went off to kindergarten. Relieved, but also just a little bit sad. Now, in the mornings, I got Joe and Debbie ready for school while Karol ate breakfast, and by the time they ran down the lane to catch the bus, I had only dirty dishes to keep me company at the empty table. It wasn’t entirely a bad thing to be alone for so much of the day. But it was an adjustment.
George had been driving, and he was still getting out from behind the wheel while Lydie was already stepping forward with her hands clasped at her collarbone. She had bad news written all over her. You didn’t waste time during the harvest just to go visiting. And I knew that Karol had gone over to their place a few hours before.
“Hazel,” Lydie said when she was still a distance away. She didn’t unclasp her hands. She raised them to her chin and let the weight of her head drop onto the knuckles. “Hazel, I’m sorry, but Karol’s got sick.”
“Sick?” I said and glanced at George as he came up beside his wife. They both stopped a few yards away, as if behind a line.
“Well, no,” George answered. “Not sick, exactly.”
And that’s when they explained that Karol had had a heart attack. He’d dropped to his knees in the soil, and they’d turned him onto his back while Theo Acker went running off to get his truck. George had pressed down on Karol’s chest, but he still wasn’t taking in air when Theo peeled across the fields, right over the rows of beans (I would see this later, I would go and stand and look at the crushed plants). They’d lifted Karol into the truck bed and then Theo had shot off like the devil to the hospital in town.
“I’ll drive you,” George said once he finished explaining. The explanation hadn’t taken long—most of the details I learned later.
“And I’ll stay here,” Lydie put in, “in case you’re not back by the time the kids get home from school.”
I had a flash of Debbie seated cross-legged on the floor listening to her teacher read a story aloud, of Joe making faces at the chalkboard from the back of the room. It was impossible to think that such a place existed or that my children were there going through their day as normal, while here I was already knowing that our lives had just changed, and changed forever. I knew it as I nodded to Lydie and told her the house was unlocked. I climbed in the front seat of the truck. We backed onto the lane and rolled down to the road, and George took a left onto Sumner without saying a word.
If I’d been able to notice it, I would have been grateful for George’s silence. Instead my mind was too busy thinking about how, as he’d delivered the news, I heard the pigs snorting and scuffling in the pen on the side of the barn and thought, I will not be able to keep all this up on my own. I’d somehow known at that moment, even as I climbed into George’s truck, that Karol would be dead by the time I got to the hospital. He was already gone, and from here on forward everything would be different, and hard.
As it was the middle of harvest, I sold only what had to go right then. The cows, the pigs. I called my sister Rena and told her I needed help, and so her husband John Charlie took care of everything. I didn’t know how he managed it, but the day before Karol’s funeral three transport trucks pulled up the lane and we all stood outside on the lawn watching the drivers load on the livestock. My sister Edith said it was like Noah’s ark. No one laughed, but she hadn’t been trying to get a laugh. Debbie remained stoic as they loaded the heifers, though when they started in on the hogs, big fat tears started rolling down her cheeks, and Rena picked her up and took her back into the house. Joe wasn’t there; I’d sent him down to George and Lydie’s place to play with their son Bobby. All the rest of us stayed watching. John Charlie directed, and I didn’t say a word because it was too much to believe that not only was Karol gone forever but all those animals, too. The barn from now on would be quiet as a tomb.
I saw just how quiet when we buried Karol the next day. The funeral was at the same little country church where we’d married, and the coffin was laid down in a grave near my parents’. There were other Baumanns: a brother who’d died when I was too young to remember him and a sister I’d never known. The other graves had familiar last names, every one of them German. Karol would be the only Wisniewski there.
The coffin wobbled a little going into the ground, but then it settled and the silence that followed nearly undid me. For ten seconds it seemed no one moved or even breathed. There wasn’t even any wind to stir the last leaves on the trees. Then our preacher recited the psalm about the Lord keeping you from harm and watching your coming and going, and we all turned and went back to the cars, all but four or five of the men, who would stay to fill in the earth with shovels. One of them was George Hughes.
At the hospital, after the doctor told me about Karol, while we were waiting for Theo to go collect my sisters, George had been the one to sit with me. He didn’t try to hold my hand or pat my shoulder. Once he said, “I wish Lydie had come,” and I understood that he meant he didn’t know how to comfort me, but his wife—my closest friend—would. Several minutes passed, and I watched the doctors and nurses passing in and out of the rooms down the long hall, and then I thought of how my husband was lying dead behind one of those doors, and I broke out in a sob so violent it felt like vomiting. George put a hand on my back then, and at the same time he took out a handkerchief from his pants pocket. It was clean and freshly pressed, and his producing it then felt like a bit of magic.
Karol and I married late. I was almost thirty, Karol thirty-three. He’d been our hired man for the past few years, and it was no surprise to anyone when he asked me to marry him. It was wartime, so the wedding was small—small enough that the wedding party and all the guests could fit into the back of a neighbor’s truck to drive to the church and back again. I wore my sister’s old gown. We had a pancake breakfast when we returned to the farm, and I got syrup on the bodice, so Iris made me take it off so she could wash out the stain before it set. For the rest of the day, I wore a regular housedress, and that about sums up the amount of fanfare the occasion won.
Not all the family was present, because of the war. All around us, men were disappearing. On trips into town, you’d hardly see a man who didn’t have white hair, and all the boys wore looks of grim determination as they waited to be old enough to go get themselves killed. My brother Junior had been drafted, and he was about the least combat-ready man I could imagine: he wasn’t one for taking directions, and he had trouble meeting a person’s eye when he was forced into conversation. John Charlie was old enough he didn’t have to go, but a man like him is always waiting for a chance to prove himself, and the smoke hadn’t cleared over Pearl Harbor before he was lining up to volunteer. Even my sister Edith joined the WAC. She was spending time in North Africa cutting strips of gauze and mopping the heads of feverish soldiers who suddenly found themselves missing limbs.
But Karol had a 4-F deferral on account of being blind in one eye, and after we married he got a 2-C as well, since he was now considered “necessary agricultural labor.” The very day of the wedding, I moved in with him in the tiny house across the lane. There was room for little more than a bed and a table and chairs, and there was no kitchen or outhouse of its own, but I was happy enough with the exchange. My mother told me that it was better than what she’d had when she married my father, leaving behind forever her family and friends in Ohio. The main house, where we still took all our meals, had once been an even smaller shack than ours. I should consider myself lucky, she said. I did.
I was luckier still when, a few years later, Karol and I were able to buy the farm. After my oldest brother Herb became a minister and moved up to Bethalto, it was assumed that Junior would be the one to take over. But he came home from the war touched in the head, silent and strange and given to unexpected rages that left my father bruised from trying to restrain him, and when a few years later he hopped a train and disappeared, my parents moved to Edwardsville, and Karol and I borrowed enough from the bank to purchase the whole property flat-out. There wasn’t any argument from my sisters: Iris had married an accountant and lived in town, Rena had the dairy farm with John Charlie, and Edith was enrolled in a college up in Chicago. They’d all moved on, and I had stayed. Now my reward was to know that I could stay there forever. My future was clear: it would be more of the same as far as the eye could see.
As far as the eye could see turned out to be a decade. Then Karol died, and nothing felt certain. Even with the livestock gone, it was too much for one person. Between Karol and me, we’d assumed the regular roles: I tended the chickens; I cooked and cleaned; I kept the house and garden and raised our children. Karol disked the fields; he tilled and planted. He did the buying of seed and fertilizer and pesticides. I had the house and the space right around it to care for. He had all those acres that made us an income.
Now I was on my own.
The day after the funeral, Rena and Iris stopped by the house. They’d both been over separately every day since Karol died, but this time they had business to discuss—I could tell by the way Iris stood looking out the window while Rena took Joe and Debbie outside. I poured coffee and set out on the table every last one of the half dozen coffee cakes that neighbors had brought over during the past few days. Then I sat down and cut myself a piece. The shock of Karol’s death had taken away my appetite, but having people in the house all the time made me want to eat.
When Rena came back inside, she nodded at Iris and the two of them sat. It was like this, Rena said: I needed a man to help me run the farm. She looked at Iris. That’s right, Iris said.
I took a big bite of the coffee cake and washed it down with some coffee. “I’m surprised you didn’t bring Edith, too.”
Rena sighed heavily. “What good’s she with this kind of business? It isn’t flowers, she don’t know a thing.” After Chicago, Edith had moved back to Edwardsville and opened a flower shop. I wasn’t sure she cared all that much about flowers for their own sake, but it was a business and she was making a living. What Rena meant was that Edith wasn’t married herself, and so wasn’t likely to counsel me on the importance of having a man to run things.
“One day he’s been buried,” I said and took another bite.
Iris looked at me pityingly. Rena shook her head. “We’re not saying you can’t grieve your husband, Hazel. Why, hell, if John Charlie were to keel over tomorrow—”
“—or Walt,” Iris added.
“—I’d be a mess. Iris would, too. You’re handling this better than anyone could expect. Look at you.” Rena pointed her fork at me. She still hadn’t taken a bite of the coffee cake, but the fork was useful for emphasis. “You’ve got dry eyes. You’re eating real good, your kids are outside playing in the leaves. This is a real victory, Hazel. You should be proud of yourself.”
Iris shook her head and sighed. “Just think what Ma would’ve done in your position. She’d have been weeping in a corner. She’d have torn out her hair by the handful.”
I glanced at the corner, as if I might see our dead mother there. “But I need to get a man to sort things out,” I said.
“The way I see it,” Rena said, “you’ve got two possibilities. The first one is, John Charlie steps in for a little while. You know he’s got a head for this kind of thing, and we’re happy to do it. We want to help you any way we can.” She paused to allow me to acknowledge the show of charity. “But long-term, now, Hazel, I just don’t know. You’ve got to get someone you trust, that’s the idea. Because it’s not simply paying someone to bring in the harvest, you’ve got to consider what’s happening market-wise, what and where to plant, all that. And the truth of it is—” She glanced at Iris.
“—you’ve got chances yet,” Iris finished. She tilted her head, pursed her lips in thought. “Forty-three’s not so young, but it’s not so old, either. You’re going to have some fellows knocking on your door, and I know it’s early, but you’ve got to consider the possibility—”
“You just have to stay open to the idea.”
The three of us were spaced out around the table, but Iris and Rena both had their backs to the window, so I was the only one who saw my son go zipping by right then with Debbie in pursuit. They were both blurs of motion, knees and elbows whipping back and forth like pistons on one of those new and modern machines that would take us all into the future. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t see their faces; they were so caught up in their play that I knew they were happy. Even in the midst of their grief, they’d found something to distract them, a thoughtless kind of freedom that was available only to them. The distractions I was being offered wouldn’t bring me any happiness: a ragged old bachelor looking for a home ready-made and a deed to sign his name on. And if not that, then I had to figure it all out on my own: selling off the tractor, finding a renter to farm the land, buying groceries and paying taxes and saving up enough for indoor plumbing so we wouldn’t be the only place in a ten-mile radius that had an outhouse forever. “I’m going to figure it out,” I said, and swept a hand around the kitchen. I intended to say more, but instead put my hands over my face and cried. And my sisters, in the way that was known to us, sipped their coffee and said nothing, and waited for me to be done.
The first Christmas Karol was gone, Lydie phoned me in early December and said that George would help me and the kids get our tree if we wanted to come over and choose it. “That’s one thing I don’t want you worrying about,” she said. “Heaven k
nows you’ve got enough else to deal with.”
She and George had a couple of acres that were set aside for Christmas trees. Most of the neighbors and a good number of folks from town drove out every year. They’d call ahead and George would come meet them out front to lend them a saw. Then they’d go pick out their favorite tree, pay him five dollars, and that was that.
Our family had gone every year when Karol was alive. The four of us would round the barn in a little clump. Then the kids would zip ahead, Debbie tripping over her own shoes trying to keep up with Joe, who always ran straight to some tree in the distance that looked perfect until you got up close and saw that the back half was all patchy. When we finally found one that was pretty full all around, Karol would lie down on the ground in his big quilted coat and start sawing while Joe or I held the trunk steady and Debbie danced around with glee.
When Lydie called with her offer, I hadn’t got around yet to thinking about how I’d manage the tree on my own. It had been less than two months since the funeral, and I was worried about all kinds of things, not least of all money. The tractor was still in the barn, and I was relying on John Charlie to help me find a renter on good terms. A Christmas tree hadn’t even figured on my list of considerations, so I was grateful to Lydie for thinking of it. I thanked her and said we’d be over that weekend.
Saturday came, and we piled in the car and went out to their place in the late morning. The weather was warm, more like it had been back in September, not at all like a normal December day. It wasn’t sunny, but there was a particular kind of light through the clouds that made everything look as if it’d been baked in egg wash. The ground was soft, and I remember thinking that this must be what Christmas feels like in Florida, all swampy and humid and nothing quite as it should be. I wouldn’t have been all that surprised to see an alligator waddling over the lawn.
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