Tallgrass (8 page)

Dad and Buddy exchanged a look, and Dad said, “Out of the mouths of babes . . .”

I bristled. I wasn’t a babe. Babies didn’t clear the table and milk the cows and clean the chicken coop. Dad had told me at harvest that I did my part, but maybe he hadn’t meant it.

“Maybe not such a babe,” Bud told him.

“Maybe not.”

They were silent while I finished carrying the dishes into the kitchen and Mom and I brought in dessert. She set a piece of pie in front of Dad, and he said, “That looks awful good, Mother. Bud, your mother makes the best apple pie in the county, maybe in all Colorado.”

“Why stop there?” Mom asked, sitting down.

Dad started in on his dessert. “They say they’re good workers, the Japanese at the Tallgrass Camp.”

“How do you know?” Bud asked.

“It’s a fact. They had farms all over California.” Dad cut a bite of pie, but instead of eating it, he left it sitting on his fork and looked Bud in the face. “I’ve been thinking about hiring a few of those boys to help with the beets. The government’s giving them work passes in other places where they’ve got camps.”

Dad put the pie into his mouth, and the rest of us ate in silence for a minute.

“Maybe if you bought a new drill and a better tractor, Loyal, you wouldn’t have to hire anybody,” Granny said. When it came to farming, Granny’s mind was always strong. She and Gramp had run our place for years before he died and she turned it over to Dad. Granny’d worked the beets more than half of her life and knew as much about them as anybody.

“I would, but where am I to get them? With the factories turning out tanks and whatnot instead of tractors, there’s no farm equipment to be had.”

Granny knit her brows together. “Don’t hire those boys hanging out by the fence last harvest.”

“You mean the white boys?” Dad asked her.

Granny nodded.

“Why’s that?” Mom asked her.

“I don’t know, but I don’t like them.” Granny was confused now, and she lapsed into silence.

“I don’t like them much myself,” Dad said. He turned to Bud. “She’s talking about Beaner Jack and them. I wouldn’t hire them, but I won’t hire those Japanese fellows, either, if you don’t want me to.”

Bud had finished eating the apples out of his pie, and he began on the crust. He was one of those people who ate all his corn before he started on the potatoes, and he ate those before the meat. He looked at Dad, surprised. “Since when do you ask my advice?”

“Since you grew up. This’ll be your farm one day, and I don’t want to cross you. Besides, with you in the army, you don’t need to worry about things at home.”

“I wouldn’t worry about the Japanese so much, but I might worry about what people around here would do if you hired men from the camp. Folks can get mean, you know. I wouldn’t put it past Beaner to take a sledge to your equipment.”

“Oh, I think I can handle those boys all right. Mom’s bees, now they’re another thing. We wouldn’t want them cutting her dead.”

“I guess you wouldn’t have to worry about them,” Mom said.

“They might make knots in your thread or take great big stitches in your quilts,” Dad said, teasing her.

“If they do, Rennie and I will just take them out.” I knew we would, too. We’d done it before, after the Stitchers had worked on her quilts.

“Well, that’s a worry off my mind.”

After we’d finished dessert, Mom and I carried the plates and forks into the kitchen, where she put the remains of the supper into the icebox while I filled the dishpan with soapy water. “What do you think about Dad hiring those Japanese?” I asked her, scrubbing a plate and putting it into the dish drainer.

Mom glanced over her shoulder into the dining room, where Dad and Bud were talking. Granny had taken out her needlework and was lost in piecing a quilt block of an airplane. “If it was up to me, I wouldn’t do it. But if it was up to me, we wouldn’t be in any war, either.” She paused, then picked up a plate and began drying it. “Still, there’s the beets to think about. We’ve got to get them planted in a few months. There’s nothing more important than that. This is not a matter of my choosing.” She paused. “What do you think about it, Rennie?”

I’d never been asked my opinion so much in my life. “Like Granny says, they’d be better than Beaner. But aren’t you worried about the Jolly Stitchers?”

“Not one bit,” Mom said quickly. Then she added, “I’ve never been one to care what other people think.”

“Huh?” I said.

After I went upstairs to bed, I reread all of Marthalice’s letters. It didn’t take long, because there were only six of them, and they were short. And Marthalice wrote with a big hand. Then I opened an old tin Whitman’s Sampler box that Granny had given me and took out a pencil and sharpened it. I removed some sheets of Santa Fe Railroad stationery that Mom had picked up on the train home from Denver. I wrote Marthalice a long letter, telling her all about Buddy’s surprise visit, because I wanted her to be part of it. And I asked when she was coming home. When Marthalice answered my letter, she said she’d give anything to see Bud in his uniform. But she never said a word about coming back to Ellis.

THE SNOW, WHICH H AD
started before Christmas, continued all night, a hard, stinging snow brought by a wind that swept a thousand miles across the prairie. The wind pounded on the north side of the house, rattling the window sashes, and I felt it, although I slept in a wooden bed with a high headboard and footboard. Snow drifted in through cracks, dusting the covers over me like flour from a sifter. I had so many quilts piled on top of me that I could hardly turn over, and I ached from being curled up into a tight ball, my feet tucked inside my flannel nightgown to keep them warm against the cold, stiff sheets. My bedroom was above the kitchen, and there was a grate in the floor to let the heat rise, but the room still was freezing. I didn’t mind, however. I liked lying there in the cold, exploring the sheets with my toes and listening to the murmur of voices below me. I felt as if I were inside a cocoon.

When I finally got out of bed, I grabbed my clothes and hurried downstairs to dress by the oil heater in the dining room. I loved icy winter mornings, when there didn’t seem to be anything in the world but our farm. Although I knew the place would go to Bud one day, I still couldn’t imagine ever living anywhere else. I wanted to attend college, and thought maybe I’d get a job and a sweet little apartment in Denver like Marthalice’s, but in my heart, I hoped I’d marry a beet farmer one day and live on a farm like ours.

The snow had stopped, and the sun shone lukewarm through the gray sky, which promised another storm. Huge drifts, polished to a shine by the wind, were pushed against the fences. Mom had fixed breakfast for Dad and Bud, and they’d gone to check the livestock. She was in the henhouse with the chickens.

“There’s flannel cakes,” Granny said, stirring the makings left in Mom’s green batter bowl. Granny turned on the flame under the frying pan and spooned in bacon drippings from the grease can. After the drippings sizzled, Granny poured batter into the pan and made a test cake, and when it was done, she threw it into the garbage pail for the chickens. Then she poured batter into the pan, and we watched until bubbles formed and created holes; then she flipped the pancakes over and let them cook for a few seconds on the other side. When they were done, she set them on a plate that had been warmed in the oven. Granny had kept the bacon warm, too, and the syrup was hot in a pan on a back burner. We did things nicer than most folks. When I spent the night at Betty Joyce’s house, we ate cold fried eggs and side meat that had congealed in its grease, because Betty Joyce’s dad said his wife wasn’t making two breakfasts. If we wanted hot food, he told us, we could get up at dawn with him.

While I ate, Granny took up her piecing, using tiny stitches to attach the tail onto the body of the airplane on her quilt square, and I thought how much things had changed since she was a girl. She and her sister had come across the prairie in covered wagons. Now Granny could look up into the sky and see airplanes, or at least she could if one ever flew over Ellis, which in my memory it never had. I wondered if things would change as much during my lifetime. They’d gotten a good start.

Dad and Bud came up onto the porch, stamping the snow off their feet and taking off their galoshes before stomping into the kitchen. Dad’s face was red, and he took off his plaid wool hat with the earflaps and rubbed his ears to warm them. “It’s colder out there than an old maid in December,” he said, going to the stove and turning on the fire under the coffeepot. “Remember there was a man up north got caught in a storm and froze his hands and feet? He wasn’t much good after that.”

“Well, what’s your excuse? You never got froze,” Granny said, and Dad squeezed her shoulder, happy that her mind was with us that morning. I was, too. It was such a fine morning that Granny deserved to enjoy it.

She reached into the dish drainer for green glass coffee mugs for Dad and Bud and took her china cup and saucer out of the cupboard. When Granny leaned over to set down the cups, I smelled cinnamon along with talcum powder, and I knew she’d already mixed up the yeast batter for cinnamon rolls for dinner. There wasn’t sugar for icing, but they’d be just as good plain.

While I finished my breakfast, the three of them sat at the table with me, drinking their coffee, chatting about the storm and how glad they were for the moisture. They talked about the little things that needed doing, the way farm folks always did at the start of a day. I loved the comfort of that talk. Bud said he’d climb up on top of the barn and fix the lightning rod that had come loose in the wind. Granny mentioned she’d sure like a new cream separator, and Dad reminded her gently that he’d bought one just that fall. Mom came in, and they asked how the chickens had weathered the storm. The talk warmed me as much as the pancakes, and I thought there wouldn’t be anything nicer than having that conversation around my own kitchen table one day. I hoped my farm wouldn’t be too far away from Bud’s, and that perhaps Mom and Dad would live with me, and we’d remember when Buddy went off to war and how worried we were, and then he’d come home without a scratch. “Why, we worried for nothing,” I’d say, and Mom would agree. Then I thought I was getting kind of sappy.

Mom turned on the fire under the teakettle and spooned fresh grounds into the basket of the coffeepot, and after the water boiled, she poured it into the pot and let the coffee drip. She was taking her cup from the drainer when we heard someone on the porch stamping snow off his feet. Dad leaned back, balancing his chair on two legs, and looked through the window in the door to see who it was. The light shone through the jewel-like panes of colored glass that framed the window, casting a rainbow of colors onto the floor.

“Come on in, Mr. Watrous. Door’s open,” Dad called before the sheriff could knock.

Sheriff Watrous opened the door and stood there a moment, kicking one overshoe against the other, but he didn’t get rid of all the snow, because after he came in and stood beside the door, a puddle of water formed on the linoleum, which was faded where Mom and Granny had scrubbed it over the years. “Cold as a witch’s behind out there, Mr. Stroud,” he said. “Ladies.” He touched his Stetson to Mom and Granny but didn’t take it off.

“Here’s some hot coffee. I must have known you were coming.” Mom handed him a cup. “How you doing, Mr. Watrous?”

“I’m doing pretty good,” he replied, sipping. You could tell the coffee was scalding hot by the way he drew in his breath after a taste.

Dad asked Sheriff Watrous if he wanted a saucer to drink his coffee from, which surprised me, because Mom said drinking coffee out of a saucer was trashy. But she also said polite people made their guests feel at home.

Mr. Watrous declined and took small sips of the coffee, and in a minute, he had drunk most of it.

“What brings you out on a day like this? I thought you’d be sitting at the jail with your feet up on the oil stove,” Dad said. Dad sounded casual, but I knew from the look on his face that he was anxious. The sheriff never stopped by to visit the way other folks did. I thought maybe some other Japanese boys had been beaten up. “Best sit down, Mr. Watrous,” Dad said.

“This might not be something for Miss Evelina and the girl.” Mr. Watrous cocked his head at Granny and me.

“There’s nothing Granny hasn’t heard, and Rennie knows considerable about the world these days.”

I sat up a little straighter, trying to act worldlier, although I’d just been thinking how nice it was that my whole world that morning was the white winter farm. I was pleased, however, that Dad didn’t tell me to go into the other room, that he felt I was old enough to know what was going on outside our place.

The sheriff took a deep breath and laid his hat on the Hoosier cupboard. “Well, it’s like this, then.” He eyed Granny and me, but he didn’t say any more about us. “You know the little Reddick girl that lives on the other side of Tallgrass? Susan, her name is.”

Dad barely nodded. I glanced at Mom, who put her hand on my shoulder but didn’t look at me. I knew she was thinking about our visit to Helen Archuleta, Susan’s sister, not long before Christmas. I hadn’t heard anything about the baby being born and wondered if something bad had happened to Helen. I wondered if the sheriff had gotten the names mixed up and he meant Helen instead of Susan.

The sheriff glanced at Mom out or the corner of his eye, but he spoke to Dad. “They found little Susan out in the field this morning, tore up pretty bad and frozen in a haystack.”

“Lost in the storm?” Dad asked. He leaned forward and put his hands flat on the oilcloth of the table, waiting for the answer. I thought about Susan losing her crutches in the wind and crawling around on the cold ground, trying to make her way back to the house. She would have reached the haystack and known she’d gone in the wrong direction and crawled into the hay to keep warm. Susan wasn’t brave, and I shivered, knowing how terrified she must have been. Shoot, I’d have been terrified, and I could walk just fine.

“No, sir. I wished that was the cause of it.” He paused and chewed his bottom lip. “The little girl was murdered. And along with it, I’m sorry to say, the poor little thing had got ravished.”