I stepped out to join her. “I have a story about your mother.”
Myrle wiped her face.
I lowered myself to the bench. I thought to rest my hand on the crown of her head, as always I had. The ashen hair of her youth never had darkened. But a man must not treat his grown daughter like a doll.
“I can tell you when first I met her. I was boarded in a house where she was the washerwoman, and your mother was always singing. The house was decrepit, but still she sang. She wore her hair in a bun, tied in a net high off her neck.” I cupped my palms behind my head to show her. Myrle gazed at my knees. “When I asked her to marry me, she stayed on the floor. I reached for her shoulders to help her to her feet, took the rag to finish the floor for her. When she saw how clean I made it, she took my chin in her hands. Ja, she said.”
Myrle scrubbed her feet against the wooden planks.
“Yes,” I said. “She answered yes. You heard me?”
My daughter nodded.
“You are the only one with the color of her hair.” I reached out to touch her, but dropped my head to my hands instead. This daughter, so alike in looks and manner to her mother.
Myrle took a strand of her hair and wrapped it about her finger. “What would have happened if Mother hadn’t been a washerwoman? If you had met at home? Would you still have left?”
The question was strange to me. I shook my head.
“I don’t know either,” she said.
Together, we sat looking out as if from the deck of a great ship. The sun had in the late afternoon fallen low and flared against the fields. Our acres were drowned. The year next, I was certain we would suffer a fine crop out of this. What a terrible burden it is to keep a child safe, to hold to her in all your weariness, lest she jump. Julius, my wife had said. A man can’t keep his children in a fist. But can you blame him for wielding hammer and nail for the few who remained? In the distance, the Elliot dogs had grown in number. The bitch must have borne a litter. They chased each other, barking the high keening of the young. Whenever the dogs started again, Myrle’s face quickened. But when at last their shadows faded, her chin fell.
“Tom Elliot told me he almost died,” she said.
“When have you and Tom been talking?”
“He told me Lee might die too.”
I gripped her arm. A cry from her. “Stay away from that boy.” When I released her, she rubbed at my fingerprints on her skin, her eyes filling. I tried to take her arm again, gently this time, but she held it close. I softened my voice. “You do not know what men want.”
“Myrle!” Esther swooped through the door and gripped her sister’s hands. I reached out to keep the girl with me, but both my daughters were off. They ran together down the steps and through the yard, their feet heavy with mud. I eyed the sky for a downpour, though the clouds appeared listless. The red of her skin stayed with me. My fingertips throbbed. My daughters could so easily be swept away by a torrent, something I never could save them from.
Part III: Motherland
LEE
I
I thought he was dead. My brother. Lying there by the reaper with his eyes closed and his arm strung up. A line of blood down his arm and it hardly looked an arm. Dead after the reaper jerked and I’d been leading it. Dead as I carted him back to the house. The field was longer than it once’d been, the furrows hard for walking with double the weight. But weight it was and would be, even when he opened his eyes.
We’d tied the reaper behind both horses. Old Buck in front and Miss Telly behind. Buck was straight and narrow an animal as he was old, Telly small for a draft, jumpy too. “Buck will lead her just fine,” Ray said. Telly and the reaper both, he meant. Even if Buck didn’t care to be led by me.
The reaper ran on a bullwheel Father had fixed. “That old one,” he said, “it was no more than a scythe on wheels.” Mechanization, Father said, though I thought the word wrong. Mechanization was for steam. That bullwheel ran smooth, so Father left us to drive it alone. Ray was twenty and one, age-wise. I had passed all of sixteen myself. I was bigger by a head, maybe more. But alone meant Ray would ride the machine. He’d straddle the wheel and clear the cutter, while for me, I sat the horses in front as I’d always done. Father had already given Ray a wooden pole with a sharp point for the job. “Just keep them straight,” Ray told me. “I’ll do the rest.”
“He won’t even have to do that much.” Father grinned and set his hat on his head. “Boys.” I had never seen Father with a face like that.
The north field was level plenty. Still it curved at the far edge to make way for the river. That would be the trouble. But I wasn’t thinking of troubles then. The sun was low but rising. The soil caked our tongues. It would be hot as fry, but it wasn’t so hot yet. In the house, Mother was baking her egg and butter crust. I counted up to twenty the times we passed the house, smelling that, while Ray was at the cutter. Ray, he never would give me a chance. “Elliot doesn’t know fields from fish,” he was saying. “Doing nothing, that’s what Elliot wants.” I cocked my head to listen for hoppers, a kind of singing. When I slept, they sounded just the same. Nan said night hoppers were different from the day. Why, at night they weren’t even hoppers at all. But I knew some creatures sing different in the dark. It was a matter of being by yourself. Who you were then and who otherwise. In bed with the ceiling low and the lanterns put out, Ray slept next to me only an arm’s reach between us. But he slept so quiet, I had plenty of time for believing I was alone.
“With Elliot, we could have gotten it done in months,” Ray talked on. “Then I’d be free for cards, harvest or not.” Ray’s voice, it was a hard thing to listen to. To ease against it, I fingered a stone in my pocket. I’d found it the day before when one of the cows kicked it up. I don’t normally take to stones. But this one showed bright against the dirt, even at dusk. It was smooth as the river, the shape of an egg and nearly the color. What so white a stone was doing in the pasture, I couldn’t figure. While all the rest were muck-colored, broken in their rocklike shapes. I cleaned it nice at the pump, carried it back to the house. Must be others like it, though I hadn’t found but the one. I watched Telly’s hooves for kicking up more.
A musk of flowers and reeds, and I knew we were close to the river again. The water was high and rushing. The sun had fallen to clouds, those clouds spitting. Buck was slagging, while Telly was near to nipping his backside. With one hand on both reins, I managed the turn. My other hand was in my pocket, thinking of stones. How that egg-shaped one could be by itself mixed in with the others. How there must be more. Ray was going on. “I told him I didn’t care if we finished it or not. I’ve got a right to go when I want.” The rain made a low kind of steam on the ground and the horses stumbled. Could have been Buck, though with a jerk of her head I knew it was Telly. She was tired of backsides. I tightened the reins. Tried to get the other hand out of my pocket, but the hand stuck. The reaper jumped with Ray riding it. Ray’s voice jumped too, the hoppers gone quiet, and behind me something cracked. I pulled the reins short. When I looked, Ray’s pole had caught in the cutter and snapped. The ropes on the bullwheel puckered. Ray stood to fish his fingers under, trying to loosen the pole. Then the horses started again. As if told to, they did, and the ropes on that wheel pulled straight. Ray’s fingers caught. I jerked the reins, but Ray was hauled up and flying over the wheel.