The Fall of Alice K. (6 page)

Being a model student was still no defense against the creeping fear
that visited her at night when she tried to sleep. Worse than the fear that she looked like a country hick, she couldn't keep the fanatical talk from sinking in: What if those wackos are right? What if the worst is yet to come? What if something really
big
was going to rain down upon them? She pictured clouds of fire coming from nowhere, devouring the wicked but leaving believers untouched as all of their friends and family rose from the grave incorruptible. Did she have to be on the reverend's side to be among the incorruptible?

Alice wasn't sure what she believed. She prayed because it gave her a feeling of relief and acceptance. Her prayers were sometimes pleas for whatever she wanted at the moment, but more often they were prayers of thanksgiving because in spite of everything bad going on in the world, she was the recipient of amazingly good fortune, though she wouldn't use that word around the Rev because he said fortune was a heathen idea. Still she prayed, “Thank you, God, for giving me the strength and mind to deal with this big messy world.”

When she finished a prayer like that, she could hear her mother's voice: “Thanking God for your superiority? When will you ever learn humility?”

6

By five in the afternoon of September 1, Alice was in a same-old same-old place in farm-girl hell. The scene was their cattle feedlot. Seventeen years on planet Earth and this is what it added up to: feeding two hundred thousand-pound steers on a sweltering afternoon. Horseflies buzzing through the stench of baked manure. Her copy of
The Grapes of Wrath
sitting on top of the control panel, tightly wrapped in plastic to protect it from corn and feed-supplement dust.

She stood at her workstation, a six-by-six-foot cubicle next to a towering white silo. This was the kitchen, the preparation room with its panel of switches on plywood boards. Switch number one started the rotating arm that scraped the corn silage from the silo, and switch number two started the auger that sent the silage rolling into an elongated mound down the center of a cement feed bunk. The odor of corn silage was not tantalizing but was lemon bath oil compared to the stench cloud that roamed the farmyard.

The moan and clatter of the augers brought the steers lumbering shaggily forward. They nudged themselves into rows to become intimate diners facing each other across the feed bunk. Silage was their first-course salad with its own vinegar dressing of fermented corn juice. The steers flicked each other's ears while their noses smeared each other's cheeks.

Switch number three started a smaller auger that corkscrewed a mixture of minerals into the cracked corn, and switch number four sent the combination streaming like crumbled corn bread over the silage. Enriched cracked corn equaled pounds gained equaled dollars. What she was doing was supposed to create the miracle that could save their farm: thick, juicy, expensive steaks for the rich.

Switches number five, six, and seven turned on the barn light, the silo
light, and the big searchlight that could pull the curtain on darkness to expose any sick animals in the far corners of the feedlot. Switch number eight turned on a space heater directed at her feet and legs. She didn't need the lights or the heater. The midday sun had driven the temperatures into the high nineties and was holding them in the mideighties. A scorcher of a day draped in a heavy blanket of humidity.

The churning auger spit bits of cracked corn in her face as it spread the golden color down the bunk. When she wiped her lip on her sleeve, the yellow dust mixed with her sweat looked like the slime collecting on the steers' noses. She pulled at her shirt. Her sweat had plastered it to her neck and shoulders. She wiped her face again, then smeared what she'd gotten from her face onto her jeans. The heat heightened the scent of everything, but the smells of the silage and cracked corn were no defense against the hogyard stench that swam through the thick air and spread its sickening flavor a hundred yards from the hogyards to the cattle feedlots where she worked. A whole farmyard under a dome of bad air. She inhaled a mouthful with every breath. Hot stinky air. The smell would stay in her wet shirt like a bad aftertaste, and her breath would smell like hog crap.

She was quite capable of handling this scene without resentment. The agony came only when she imagined herself being watched by someone her age who attended an Eastern prep school. The preppy would see a gangly country hick, a measly laborer who at best listened to corny religious music and entered the Rice Krispies bar competition at the county fair. She watched her hands working—the grime under her fingernails and the hard calluses on her fingers. No wonder people who worked on farms were called farmhands. The hands said it all: her hands were who she was.

Looking at her hands led her to the rest of the stinky truth of her life. Sweat had turned her light blue shirt into a dark blue. Sweat dripped off her lip and trickled down her neck under her ear. Sweat was a friend and a bother. She gave it credit for opening her pores and keeping her skin cool, but it was also busy soaking things in. Sweat as sponge. It sucked in dust. Dirt dust. Corn dust. Mineral dust. Dried steer manure dust. Steer dandruff dust. And it sucked in smells, the whole barnyard smorgasbord of vaporized manure and silage and tractor diesel fuel. It
probably sucked in the smell of steer breath. Then that awful itch when the intense heat slathered them all together. The back of her neck itched. The top of her head itched. She resisted scratching her head because she didn't want her dirty hands to make her hair dirtier. Trying to think of something besides the itch just turned it into a herd of ants moving down her back. The worst thing was that she knew the tracks of sweat were leaving tracks of bad smells all over her body. Her only comfort—and it was an uncomfortable comfort—was knowing she wouldn't be near any Romeo in the next twenty-four hours. Perhaps things would change in the romance department once school started and she'd given herself a good fall cleanup.

The steers had settled down to their slathering and munching. She checked out the long mound of silage mixed with cracked corn and minerals that the feed augers had delivered down the bunks. The steers had kicked up dust when they came toward the grinding sound of the augers, but once they had settled down to their chomping, they were a pleasant sight, a consolation prize for her sweaty efforts. The steers were their own kind of beautiful, even though their mission in life was to gain weight, and gain it fast. All those fat backs lined up on either side of the feed bunk rippled away from her in mounds of prime meat. The strange symmetry of it all. The innocence of it. She didn't harbor a silly love for them. She knew they'd be steaks and hamburgers in a few months, but she didn't fight these moments when, hearing them chew in unison, she could imagine music that would be a perfect complement to the whole scene. She could funnel Bach's
Art of Fugue
played on a harpsichord into the canopy over the feed bunk. Bach would make the steers' hair ruffle. The steers would be so content they'd gain four pounds a day.

She climbed the fence and walked around them looking for the big three—listlessness, runny nose, and cough. The steers were surviving the heat in good form but didn't have the sense to know that a pressure-cooker day like this guaranteed bad weather. These hoof-footed meat carriers. She reached out to rub the shag-carpet back of her favorite tame black steer. A gray mound of dust rose at her touch, then clung to the moisture on her hand. She couldn't find an unsoiled spot left on her jeans, so she dipped her hands into the steers' egg-shaped drinking tank and shook them off.

As she left the swelter of the feedlot, a dozen swallows dove and swirled over the dry alfalfa field. They were doing what swallows do—swallowing—though she couldn't see what insects were on the menu on the first of September.

Swallows were sky dancers who radiated moving color as they flew with their shiny chocolate heads and their maple chests against the background of the pale blue sky. And those sharp-edged tails and wings, the way they made slicing the air look like a spatula swiping through meringue. They were a medley of happiness as they flew, and Alice knew they'd continue to live the good mood of their movements when they weren't flying. They never squabbled or complained like crows or starlings or blue jays. They didn't push each other out of a nest unless they were teaching their young to fly. Swallows made living look so easy. So swift. So graceful. If they could live past their label of barn swallows, maybe she could live past her label of farmhand.

She walked back to the control panels and retrieved
The Grapes of Wrath.
She had already read it once and was almost finished rereading it. The air outside felt too hot and sticky for reading, so she carried the book back up the haymow. Before putting it in its place behind the hay bale, she unzipped the plastic bag and pulled it out. She flipped through the final chapter until she came to her favorite sentence of all: “For a minute Rose of Sharon sat still in the whispering barn.” She didn't try to remember what happened next at this point in the novel; she just loved the sound of that sentence, the lilt of it, which was very much like the flight of the swallows.

7

The evening supper table was a sober scene: her stern father offering a stern prayer, her severe mother challenging everything with a menacing stare that never erupted into words, and her soft sister Aldah clinging to Alice's arm when she was not pointing for more food. And more food.

As Alice lay in bed that night, she didn't think about the smoldering discomfort of the dinner table, or the smells she might have taken to bed with her, or about the weather, but she woke to a distant rumbling. Thunder didn't frighten her. It brought back the memory of her kind grandmother saying, “It's just God talking.” Thunder as God's comforting voice. It had sunk in. She loved that booming voice.

A bolt of lightning streaked across the sky, followed by a sound of ripping canvas—and then the ba-boom when the bolt bit the dirt within a mile. The sky fluttered with lightning and the clouds murmured with thunder. God was tired of chitchat and getting down to business.

“Alice!” her father yelled up the stairs. “We're getting some weather. It's headed straight at us.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said. Tornado season was past. This wouldn't be the first storm their house survived. The approach of a big Midwestern storm could be more exciting than frightening—like watching a bull charge toward you when you're standing safely behind a metal gate.

“Alice!” This time it was the family witch. “Close the windows and get down here.”

“In a sec.”

“Get down here! Aldah is scared!”

So why wasn't she doing something about it?

“I'm getting dressed.”

“Did you hear me?”

“I said I was coming.”

“This could be it,” she heard her mother say in her practiced ominous voice.

Alice put on her soft fleece sweater and work jeans. She wasn't dressing for the weather; she was dressing to comfort her sister Aldah. When she got downstairs, her father had gone out to lock down any loose doors. She heard the clink of the metal gates in the hog pens. The feeder cattle could find shelter in the sturdy gambrel-roofed barn or the corrugated metal cattle shed that had its back to the wind. Their big block of a house had stood up to a century of Midwest weather, and this storm wasn't about to scare it off its foundation.

Her mother stood in her usual place in front of the kitchen sink, staring out the window at the approaching storm with the family Bible clutched against her stomach. At moments like this, Alice couldn't decide if her mother was a pillar of faith or a pillar of skepticism. How could a person of faith be either so sour or so fearful of everything?

Lightning struck somewhere close with a force Alice could feel in her cheekbones. Blunt fists of wind whacked the house in a syncopated rhythm. This was a stuttery storm—and that was not a good sign. The deep-throated thunder gurgled closer. No longer the voice of God, it sounded like a beast that couldn't make up its mind, sniveling one minute and grunting the next. The lights went out like an exclamation point. Alice swam through the wake of darkness, trying to find Aldah. Her whimpering cries were everywhere—and moving. At Alice's touch, her sister flung her arms around Alice and buried her face in Alice's sweater. If Alice smelled bad, she knew Aldah would never say so. Now the wind leaned against the house with a steady pressure. Twigs and gravel sprayed noisily past the windows, but the house shrugged its shoulders, and Alice thought for an instant: would that the rest of us could be so sure of our place on the planet.

Alice's mother remained standing, her legs apart as if she were getting ready for something. She had laid the Bible down and had both hands on the counter as if she were bracing for whatever was coming at them. This was neither a position of fear nor faith. It looked more like a position of defiance.

Alice turned to Aldah. “We're not going anywhere,” she said and stroked Aldah's head.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

A golden light appeared in the doorway from the porch. Her mother turned toward it, and in a voice that sounded like startled relief, she sighed, “Oh, Father,” as if she were looking into the face of the Lord of Hosts Himself, but before she could transfigure into the glories of heaven, the light transformed into Alice's father carrying the old kerosene lantern in one hand and a flashlight in the other. Her mother's arms came down in the deliberate slowness of a chicken hawk perching on a fence post. Alice couldn't see her father's face, but she sensed that he wanted to comfort Aldah and her when he shone the flashlight where they huddled next to the kitchen table.