Praise for Go Away Home
“Go Away Home is a tale of choices, dreams realized and rejected, and how values evolve. . . . Gently compelling and highly believable.”
—D. Donovan, reviewer, Midwest Book Review
[Go Away Home] “skillfully blends the events of the wider world into the talk and gossip of small-town Iowa. The result is a memorable and warmly small-focus novel that repays rereading.”
—Steve Donoghue, Historical Novel Society
“Go Away Home is the perfect story of coming home. Excellent characters and an extremely realistic plot made this a great book.”
—Samantha Rivera, Readers’ Favorite
Also by Carol Bodensteiner
Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2015 Carol Bodensteiner
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503944206
ISBN-10: 1503944204
Cover design by Elsie Lyons
In memory of my grandparents, Carl and Mary Elizabeth Jensen, whose lives inspired this story
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Go Away Home Reader Discussion Guide
About the Author
Chapter 1
Iowa—1913
A fly buzzed against her cheek, and Liddie brushed it away with the back of her hand, leaving a streak of flour in the sweat trickling down her temple. When a train whistle sounded in the distance, it triggered dreams that were never far from her mind. She imagined standing on the platform, handing the porter her bag, stepping up into the car, and waving good-bye. The boldness of the idea thrilled her.
She sighed and turned her attention back to the bread dough. At sixteen, she dreamed of breaking away, of deciding her own future, of traveling, of doing anything but living on a farm. She wanted to see beyond the farthest rolling hill and start living her life. She hummed a wordless tune, matching her rhythm to the pulse of the train chugging by on the tracks.
Grabbing a handful of flour from the bin, she spread it across the breadboard. She lifted the heavy gray crockery bowl and turned a small mountain of sticky dough onto the floured surface. Enough to make six big loaves. Enough to last her family a week. After coating her hands with more flour, she dusted it across the dough. Then she grasped the outside edge of the dough and pulled it into the center, pushing the mass with the heels of her hands. Outside to inside: Brown’s Station to Chicago. Outside to inside: Chicago to New York.
Looking out the kitchen window, Liddie saw her mother and sister bent like question marks over their hoes. Amelia had inherited their mother’s stocky build. From this distance, and with both of them wearing wrappers and straw hats, one could be mistaken for the other. The hems of their dresses snagged on vines as they moved down the long garden rows, clearing weeds and breaking up the black Iowa soil—ground so rich a seed need only fall on it to spring to life and make a crop. Just-picked radishes and peas filled a basket at the end of the row.
Liddie strained to make out what they were saying. The words eluded her, but she could detect a certain tension in the tone. Well, it was a hot day—unusually so for mid-June. She was glad to be inside making bread. Though it was close in the kitchen, at least she was out of the sun and an occasional breeze through the open door offered some relief.
She had begun mixing the lard, water, yeast, and flour as soon as the breakfast dishes were cleared, measuring the amounts automatically from long experience. Before she was ten, she’d learned to make bread. She was a competent cook—the best way to a man’s heart, her mother so often said. Bread baking was the only household chore for which Liddie was solely responsible, and she took great pride in it.
Outside to inside. Outside to inside. The dough took shape. A lock of cinnamon-colored hair came loose from the twist she’d so carefully sculpted that morning. It was when she put up the pin-straight hair that came from their father’s side that Liddie especially envied Amelia their mother’s curls. She hooked the strand with her little finger, tucked it behind her ear, and continued kneading.
In her free time, she studied pictures in magazines and newspapers to see how city ladies fixed their hair and dressed. The latest fashion was hobble skirts. As she had considered making such a dress for herself, she had wondered how anyone negotiated such a narrow hem. So one morning, she’d looped a rope around her ankles to limit her stride just as a hobble skirt would. She practiced walking in her room, giggling as she inched around with shortened steps. When she finally went downstairs, she found she could not move with ease and had to grab the table several times to keep from falling.
“What’s the matter with you?” her mother asked as she set to folding the towels she’d upended out of a laundry basket onto the kitchen table. “Are you sick?”
Laughing, Liddie collapsed into a chair, pulled up the skirt of her cotton housedress, and displayed the ropes that had worked their way past the tops of her shoes and now snagged at her stockings.
“What on earth?” Her mother frowned.
“I was practicing how to walk in a hobble skirt.” Liddie slipped the rope off one leg and ran to the bureau to get the picture of the dress she’d found in the Ladies’ Home Journal her aunt Kate had brought during her last visit.
Her mother surveyed the picture. “That is the silliest thing I’ve ever seen,” she said.
“It’s beautiful. Look how the shape of the skirt makes her seem so tall and elegant.”
“You couldn’t do an honest bit of work in
that.” She pulled another shirt out of the clothes basket.
Liddie considered the picture. Women who lived in cities did not hoe weeds, gather eggs, or milk cows. How they did spend their days she could only imagine.
“And now you’ve torn your stockings,” her mother had said. “Mend them before the holes get bigger.”
Remembering that day made her giggle. She glanced at the table where her sewing basket waited. She enjoyed making bread, but not nearly as much as she enjoyed sewing. She picked up the pace of her kneading to get to the work in her basket more quickly. Only the monogram remained to complete the shirt she was making for Papa. Her future was in that shirt—it was part of the plan she and Aunt Kate had hatched to transform her from farm girl to city seamstress.
After spreading another bit of flour on the board, she continued to work the dough outside to inside, enjoying its transformation into a firm, elastic ball.
“How’s the bread coming?”
Liddie jumped at the unexpected greeting. “Aunt Kate! I didn’t hear you come downstairs.” Holding her flour-covered hands in the air, she gave her aunt an awkward hug.
Kate kissed her niece’s cheek and wiped away the flour smudge. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I’ve survived worse.” Liddie grinned. “It’s ready to rise.” She returned the ball of dough to the bowl, swiped fingers dipped in lard over it to keep the surface moist, draped a cotton towel across the top, and slid it to the back of the counter.
“Where’s Margretta?” Kate asked.
“Mama’s in the garden with Amelia. Did you talk to her again?” Liddie asked. “What did she say? What do you think Papa will say?”
Kate laughed as she looked out toward the garden. “Are you forgetting I just arrived last night? I have to work into these things.” She opened the cookie jar and peered in, considering the contents before taking out three chewy molasses cookies. “It was good of you all to let me sleep in on my first day. But alas, I’ve missed breakfast.”
“I thought maybe you talked after I went to bed.” Liddie poured her aunt a cup of coffee, and they sat at the kitchen table.
Kate dipped a cookie in the coffee and chewed it slowly, a look of bliss on her face.
Liddie waited. It was pointless to rush her aunt when she was savoring a sweet. An abundance of pastries lent a plumpness to Kate that strained the seams of the dark tailored suit dresses she had favored since moving from classroom to administration.
“Yes, I talked with your mother. She still doesn’t much like the idea of you living away from home so young . . .”
“I’ll be seventeen in four months!”
“You’re still her baby and she worries about you. And since you’re dead set on not following in my footsteps into the classroom . . .” Kate’s eyebrows arched in a familiar movement that often signaled the beginning of a lecture, most likely on the merits of teaching. Liddie kept her face impassive. “Your mother doesn’t want you to be at loose ends.”
“I don’t mean it as a slight to you. Or Amelia. Amelia likes keeping a roomful of children corralled. I wouldn’t.”
“Teaching has its advantages. Like spending weeks each summer with you.”
“That’s true.” Liddie enjoyed her aunt’s visits. Each time she came, Kate brought with her a bit of the world Liddie longed to experience. Though her mother and aunt looked alike, the similarity ended there. While her aunt talked about suffrage and women’s rights and the latest theories in pedagogy, her mother’s days revolved around laundry and gardening and the next meal.
When she was thirteen, Liddie had spent a week with her aunt in Dubuque, where Kate worked as a school superintendent. Kate took her to a suffragette rally, where Liddie was entranced by the speakers who described so fervently the changes women would make when they had the right to vote.
Now Liddie leaned forward, willing to set aside her own interests for news of the suffragettes. “What have you heard about suffrage?”
Kate signaled dismay with a shake of her head. “I really thought with Illinois getting the ball rolling with their vote this year we’d see more fervor in Iowa. We have been distressingly quiet since the march in Boone. Five years ago already! There’s a rally in Dubuque next month. Mrs. Carter—you heard her speak—hopes Mr. Roosevelt’s enthusiasm will convince more women to join the cause and more men to support suffrage even though he didn’t win the presidential election.”
“Could I go? Would you take me?”
“Your mother wasn’t happy with me the last time,” Kate said. “She sent you away for a week, and you returned making placards and marching around the house.”
Liddie slumped in her chair. “Every day I spend on the farm, I feel like the world is passing me by. I want more.”
“More what?” Kate asked. “And please sit up. Ladies do not slouch.”
Liddie pulled herself upright. Since the last time her aunt visited, Liddie had grown two inches and was now taller than her mother. She stretched tall and lean like her father and her brother, Vern. Excitement pulsed in her chest as she thought about her future, and she leaned forward, her face animated.
“Training to be a seamstress is a good start. From there, who knows? I might have a career. I could make dresses like the ones in the magazines.” She hesitated. “Can women do that?”
“I don’t see why not. Women surely know better than men what a woman would wear.” Kate finished off the second cookie and bit into the third.
Liddie started to flop back in her chair but immediately thought better of it. “If I stay on the farm, Mama and Papa will push me to marry a farmer, like they’re trying to do with Amelia.”
Six years older than Liddie, Amelia was well into marrying age. And Amelia wanted to get married, as she said so often. But none of the men she liked survived their father’s critical eye. Meanwhile, the local farm boys their parents suggested invariably arrived cloaked in the aroma of pig manure—and left, predictably, before it was dark.
“What do you mean?”
“Amelia was seeing a fellow. Fred Winslow. He came here from Indiana last summer.”
“Was seeing?”
“Papa put his foot down last week. Said Fred was a no-account, not worth Amelia’s time. Right after that, Fred left town. Papa said Fred leaving so quick only proved his point. Amelia’s heartbroken.”
“What did this Fred person do?”
“Not enough, Papa said. When he came to Iowa, Fred worked for the railroad, but he quit and hired on with a farmer over by Hurstville. Then he quit that and made deliveries for the mercantile.”
“Hmm.”
“He liked Amelia. He took her to picnics and dances, he sang and was a lot of fun. They’d sit on the porch at night until Papa made him go home.” Liddie paused. “Mama and Papa say they want Amelia to get married, but they don’t agree with the men she likes. It’s been a row around here lately.”
“Are you as determined not to marry a farmer as Amelia seems to be?”
“I don’t plan to marry anyone! You know that.” She shifted uneasily as she thought for a bit before asking something that had been on her mind for months. “Aunt Kate, does it bother you that people call you an . . . old maid?”
“My goodness! Why do you ask?”
“I overheard Mrs. Stevens say if Mama and Papa don’t look out, Amelia will be an old maid. That made me wonder about you.” Liddie furrowed her brow as she looked at her aunt. “You’re successful and happy even though you never married. But she made being an old maid sound like the worst thing in the world.”
“Many people think it is. And they have their reasons. But I believe no woman should get married just to be married. Thank heaven and the suffrage movement that girls have choices these days. That’s what we’ve been fighting for.” She saluted Liddie with what remained of the last cookie. “If I’m called an ol
d maid because I made my own choice, well, my dear, then I wear the title proudly.” She popped the cookie into her mouth.
“Liddie!”
Liddie heard her mother’s voice and ran to the window. She saw her sister collapsed in the garden, and the hair rose on her arms. “Something’s wrong with Amelia!”
She raced out the screen door and across the lawn, leaping over the vegetable rows, then dropped to her knees at Amelia’s side. The sight of her sister’s pasty-white face sent a chill up her back. “Is she dead?”
“Don’t be silly.” Her mother rubbed Amelia’s cheeks. Margretta looked up at Kate, who’d arrived breathing heavily from the exertion. “She fainted.”
“Amelia!” Liddie grasped her sister’s hand and pressed it to her own cheek, the warmth assuring her, more than her mother’s words, of her sister’s well-being. “Amelia! Say something. Are you all right?”
Amelia’s eyelids fluttered. She struggled to raise her head, but her eyes crossed and she fell back. The look on Amelia’s face would have been comical if her face hadn’t been so white.
Their mother grasped Amelia under the arm. “Let’s get her to the house. Help me lift her, Kate.” She motioned Liddie toward the pump. “Get some water.”
“What happened, Margretta?” Kate asked as she took Amelia’s other arm and helped to half walk, half drag Amelia out of the garden and into the shade on the porch steps.
Racing ahead to the pump, Liddie couldn’t hear her mother’s answer. With a few urgent strokes of the pump handle, she coaxed cold water up from the well into the bucket and grabbed the tin cup from the hook. She ran to the porch and thrust the cup into her mother’s hands.
Margretta dipped water and held the cup to Amelia’s lips.
“Your apron, Liddie.” Kate held out her hand.
Liddie untied the strings and handed the apron to her aunt, who soaked it in the bucket and pressed it against Amelia’s neck.
Liddie crouched at her sister’s knees, relieved to see color returning to Amelia’s cheeks. “What happened?”
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