Plains Song (12 page)

“You can see I'm expecting again,” she said. That was all. The baby, Blanche, was in the wicker clothes basket, in a heap of dried wash. Sharon thought the head was much too large for the body. The infant soberly returned Sharon's startled gaze. “They say she looks like Mama,” Madge said. “Ned thinks so.” And so she did. Already the large, deep-set eyes took Sharon's measure. The lips were firm. She would not smile until she was tickled. “I say she's like you,” said Madge, “but I guess she's both.”

“No Kibbee to speak of so far,” said Ned.

“Cora says at least she's not born on a farm. She's got an inside toilet and running water.”

Ned said, “You heard that one about the Indian?” Sharon hadn't. “This Indian goes to a hotel, for a room, and the clerk says he's got one with running water. The Indian doesn't want it. He says he wants a room all by himself.” He moved his head from side to side, his eyes lidded. Madge allowed time for the joke to settle.

“Cora's well?” asked Sharon.

“She won't be happy till she's got her flush toilet,” said Ned.

“She won't be happy then either,” said Madge.

Ned propped the screen door open with the wicker basket as they squeezed by him into the house.

Ned Kibbee's mother had given the newlyweds a fourposter bed, made by her people in Pennsylvania; otherwise everything was new, inside and out. The fourposter bed was put in the guest room since it was difficult for Madge, once she was pregnant, to crawl in and out of it easily. It would be Sharon's bed as long as she cared to stay. Ned's mother and Madge had made the curtains, and all her friends in Battle Creek had given her a cuckoo clock which drove Ned crazy. If she was to use it at all, she had to stop it at night, then start it again when she got up in the morning.

The guest room had not been papered because the plaster had been so slow to dry. Now that it had finally dried, Ned didn't have the time. He had more work than he could do, but he had to do it himself if he wanted it done right. If the doors were hung wrong on a house they might never close right. Two boys had put the roofing paper on a house so that it looked as if the shingles were on edgewise. Madge had asked for, and got, a coal-oil stove, but once she had it she didn't like it. The wicks were always charred. The oil could be smelled all over the house. Smells she hadn't minded at all on the farm were disagreeable to her in the new house. The golden oak furniture had come so well crated Ned had used the wood to build a fruit cellar in the basement. The divan of the three-piece living room suite opened out to make a bed guests could sleep on. Madge found it hard to sit on, but not everybody had her short legs. Ned had put the same wax on the furniture that he put on the floor. To save the floor in the kitchen and the dining room, Madge
had covered it with linoleum, which Blanche kept polished with the seat of her diapers. While Madge talked to Sharon, little Blanche nursed greedily. Sharon thought it unattractive in a baby girl. Yet it pleased Sharon to sit listening, and nodding, as Madge talked. In the past it was Madge who had listened to Sharon, mending what needed mending, or peeling what needed cooking, but no one would say to her now as in the past, “The cat got your tongue?” Madge missed her old friends, but it wouldn't be for long as the girls got married and the boys moved to the city. One of them had bought a lot just a block to the west. Ned would build him a house on it. He was sweet on Miriam Stoll. Did Sharon remember Miriam? She did not.

Madge had so much to say, while she was preparing supper, that she didn't get around to saying how much she missed Sharon Rose, although of course she did. During the meal, which Ned helped serve, it being tiring for Madge to get up and down from the table, she did ask Sharon what Chicago was like, and if Sharon meant to stay there. Sharon found a city so large was hard to describe. What she liked most was the lake, having never before seen so much water. She liked her work. In the library she often met interesting people. Lillian Baumann's home was like a resort, always noisy and alive with music-loving people. Had she made some new friends? Oh, yes, Sharon had made some new friends, including Professor Grunlich, on his sabbatical from Dartmouth, who liked to pause in his research to entertain Sharon with stories of his life in Paris, Florence, and other places. Professor
Grunlich would have liked to know Sharon better, but he feared to lose her by being too forward. He talked to her while she listened, nodding, returning books to the shelves. Madge would have loved to hear about Professor Grunlich, or even Orville Wiley, a young man she often saw on the Clark Street car in the morning, who kept a place for her by putting his hat and valise on the seat. He worked in the Loop, on La Salle Street, but he took drawing lessons at the art museum on Michigan Boulevard. He never tired of asking Sharon to go to the museum or a movie with him. She was always too busy. She did not like the way he took the liberty of calling her Puss. Madge would have very much liked to hear of these friends, but Sharon was reluctant to bring them up. What Madge wanted to hear was not about her friends, unless they were boys. What was it in Sharon that refused to give Madge, who had every right to know, this small satisfaction? For her part, Madge found it hard to imagine getting up and going off every morning, or living in a place with so many people she would never know.

On Sunday Ned drove them all out to the farm. From the road at the front the house looked about the same, with the paint scaling on the exposed side. After more than twenty years Emerson had given up thinking of putting on a front porch nobody would ever use. Everybody came in and out at the back. Down at the end of the driveway the barns and sheds were the faded color of bricks, the cottonwoods at the back taller and greener than Sharon remembered. Emerson now milked a herd of eighteen cows. It was worth the
trouble of a Battle Creek merchant to come to the farm twice a month for Cora's butter and eggs. Almost a hundred fifty chickens, most of them now Leghorns, laid their eggs where only Cora knew where to find them, but Orion was around to help her clean them and put them into cases made for just eggs. Until the car wheeled around to face the house Sharon had forgotten about Cora's yard, the grass clipped as short as the lawns in Chicago. A quilting frame with an unfinished quilt was set up in the shade near the back porch. A few old hens pecked around in the dishwater scum near the screen. The shed to the west, the original house, had been painted green with white windows; the cobs inside pressed against the glass. A covey of pale-gray doves sat on the dung-whitened ridge of the shingle roof. There was no sound but their mournful crooning. Was it the absence of people? Sharon could not account for the way it moved her. Cora's weathered house—one defined it as Cora's—a square frame house with screen-dulled windows, seemed to Sharon, as she approached it, charged with disturbing expectations. The trail that edged the grass, from the porch to the pump, was hard and smooth as old boards. Her nose to the screen, Sharon saw Emerson's hats on the range food warmer, beside his tin of Union Leader tobacco. On the table near the door the dipper floated on a full bucket of water. The draft off the kitchen smelled of scorched ironing. The screen was latched.

“Call her,” said Madge. “See if she knows you.”

Huskily Sharon said, “Oh, Cora—”

“She won't hear that,” said Madge, and gave a rap on the screen. Until she moved, Cora had been invisible. She rose from the cot in the room off the kitchen, which had appeared to be empty.

“It's so warped,” she said aloud, referring to the screen, “I have to hook it against the flies.” She unhooked it, then allowed her gaze to rest on Sharon. On the stove, simmering, the lid of a pot wobbled. Cora said, “Lord, child, you've grown.”

“It's the heels, Mama,” Madge explained.

They faced each other without touching. To Sharon, the lath-flat, graying woman looked taller. Did she move back a step to see Sharon better, or to maintain her distance?

“Aren't you surprised?” said Madge. Ned stood behind her, holding Blanche.

Cora said, “You might have called me.”

“I'm not used yet to your having a phone, Mama.”

“Let me take her,” said Cora, and reached to take the sleeping child from Ned. “One of you go wake Emerson,” she said.

“Oh, don't wake him,” said Sharon. “Let him nap.”

“How you expect him to see you if you don't wake him?” Cora moved before them, saying, “Come in here where it's cool.”

“If we wanted it cool we'd stay in the yard,” said Madge, “but we don't like the flies.” Gnats buzzed in the halo of light caught in her veil. “I'm dying of thirst,” Madge said, rattling the dipper. “It's got so I'm already used to ice.”

Cora said, “If you'd have phoned I'd have thought
of something.” She led them through the dark dining room, the blinds drawn, into the glare of the front room.

“What do you see that's new?” asked Madge. The three women stood together at the room's center. Sharon peered around.

“The rug,” she said. The rug was new. The old rug had worn away beneath the rocker.

“What else?” asked Madge.

The piano was not new but it held Sharon's attention. The player rolls were stacked in even rows along the top, the labeled ends exposed. An open hymnbook sat on the rack.

“You're too citified,” said Madge, and tilted her head to look at the ceiling. A bulb hung there on a cord, with a paper shade. Madge reached forward to give a tug on the dangling cord. The bulb glowed with a visible tremor.

“It does that when the motor's running,” said Ned, “not when it's off.”

Madge said, “I still don't believe it.”

“We don't need it in the daytime,” said Cora, and switched it off.

“There's something else,” said Madge, giving Sharon a wink, “but oftener than not I forget it.”

Cora made no comment as Sharon turned to look at the telephone on the wall. The wallpaper was scuffed and soiled where their knuckles had rubbed it turning the crank.

“Can you believe it?” asked Madge.

“It just comes to me,” said Ned, “it's up too high on
the wall for Sharon to use it.” He stood at the door to the kitchen, his face perspiring, holding a dripping dipper of water.

Cora said, “Which one of you is going to tell Emerson he's got visitors?”

Sharon would later tell Lillian just how it was she felt, but not what she saw. Cora had taken a seat in the rocker, holding Blanche, the brim of the blue velvet bonnet turned back from her face. The lids of her eyes opened and closed to the rhythm of Cora's rocking, like those of a doll. Cora appeared to be gazing into her own face as an infant. A clumping sound caused the light bulb to wobble as Emerson descended the stairs. At the kitchen door, the light in his face, his eyes were pale as water; his sleep-tousled hair rose to a wispy peak. Seeing Sharon, he said, “So you come back?”

“She's on a visit,” Madge replied. “She's on a visit.”

Sharon said, “How are you, Uncle Emerson?”

“He's better now he's give up chewing,” said Cora. “It was chewing gave him the weight in his stomach.”

“I sleep better too,” he said, “except for the times people wake me up.”

It startled Sharon to see how mild he looked. In her childhood he had been such a heavy presence she had seldom looked at him directly. It was the top of his balding head she saw when they said grace. Ned brought them all glasses of water in amber-colored glasses.

“You took her company glasses,” said Madge.

“They're for iced tea mostly,” said Cora.

“They make it look like iced tea, but it don't taste it,” said Emerson.

Sharon said, “Chicago water is terrible. You can taste and smell the chlorine in it.”

“Now, why they do a thing like that?”

“They take the water from the lake, and they do it to kill the germs.”

There was silence, while Emerson pondered what he had heard. Putting his right hand to his jaw, he stroked it as if feeling for a sore place, the beard making a rasping sound.

“I've never felt drawn to cities,” said Cora.

“Ella-noise is prairie country,” said Emerson, “flat as a pancake.”

Madge said, “Where'd you read that?”

He was immune to sarcasm.

“Ned,” said Madge, “you better get Orion.”

“If he's restin', let him be,” said Emerson. “It's what he does best.”

Sharon said, “How is he?”

“He's well as you might expect,” Cora replied.

Through the curtained window at the side they watched Ned follow the trail to Orion's house. Sunlight dappled the roof and the sheets of paper on the floor of the outbilly. Cora offered Blanche one of her knuckles to chew on, removed it and said, “She's cutting teeth already.” Emerson adjusted the movable back of the chair so he could sit upright.

“This chair was worth every nickel it cost me,” he said.

“It didn't cost you a nickel. Orion gave it to you.”

“That's what I said.”

“How's Fayrene?” asked Sharon.

“She's with her people in Okie. She pays them a visit every summer.”

“She's got a boy sweet on her,” said Emerson.

Madge said, “You don't know sweet from sour.”

“I know a boy from a girl,” he replied, “and I'm beginning to wonder if I've seen the last one.”

Cora said, “They'd all be boys if it was up to me.”

She rocked, her gaze through the door to the shimmer of light rising from the road. Sharon wondered if she had forgotten the child in her lap. The screen to Orion's house slammed, then they could hear the swish and crackle of the branches as the men came toward them. Sharon saw him, in advance of Ned, cross the yard with his hurried, almost stumbling stride. He wore his hat to conceal the whiteness of his head. What were her feelings, besides sorrow and pity? She had never been at ease with her father. He was the neighbor who came and went. He smelled of liniment. Now he came headlong through the kitchen to where the light and the assembly stopped him, his hands lifting slowly to frame his face. His eyes blinked. He seemed to have trouble focusing. The man she saw was no farmer but a city bum, like those idlers in the parks of Chicago, his clothes wrinkled with sleep, his pants grass-stained at the knees.