IX
Enidina

(Fall 1925–Spring 1933)

Those twins had been my first. The first that lived. I remember how Kyle had come in after the doctor and the way his mother tried to keep him out. After they were born, that boy stood watch while I slept with a newborn under each arm. When both the twins fussed, he touched a finger to their lips and looked as if he might cry himself. How strange they must have seemed to him, red and small and still smelling of the bed with everything I’d pushed out. He was just a little thing himself, with the boyish scent of sweat and spit. But ever since, Kyle watched over my own as well as any mother might.

I should have known they were coming. In the months before, I’d taken a liking to the feel of dirt on my tongue. With my first child, the dirt had tasted of metal and snow. With the second it was almost sweet, filled with leaves and twigs. Before the twins, the earth seemed grainy, like bread. I’d heard of such cravings in women. No one looked on them kindly. But out in the fields, already covered with the stuff, tasting the earth I sweated over seemed right. A kind of nesting. Borden had said we were made of so much, after all.

After the twins were born, I was uneasy with them and seldom left them alone for long. Frank said I should be sure of them, these sudden children. But I didn’t know what had been right in me to bear them out. I found some old gunnysacks that seemed good and sturdy and fitted them so I might have a hole for my head and a seat for the twins to kick their legs. Outside while I worked, one child hung to my front and the other to my back. “The Hunchback,” Frank called us, grinning. “The Terrible Three.” I waved him off. This place and what we’d raised on it, it was suddenly my own. I felt a comfort from their weight. A steady strength. As long as I carried them both, the twins never fussed.

I’d never known what it was like to have a part of you looking back. That birthing meant you carried that child with you for the rest of your life. As they slept, I held my hand above their mouths to feel the warmth of their living. Their need of me, I was embarrassed by it. Never before had I been the object of such attention, as if I deserved it simply by bearing them out. Maybe I did. My boy, I don’t know how any woman makes sense of what she’s carrying, before or after a birth. It took me a while myself to understand.

It was before the twins were born, before I even knew I was expecting, that Jack raised his barn. From our yard, I heard him drive the nails and split the wood. It would take a year and more of careful work, as Mary wouldn’t let their boys help him much. Holding the twins in my arms, I watched Jack build it after they were born. Over the fields the frame of that barn stood in the distance, and one at a time the walls went up and stayed. Jack finished the roof of that barn, painted the sides a dark red. Those twins of mine grew. They dropped from my hold on them and learned to walk, learned to speak their minds and carry out their chores better than any mother could expect. But what Jack did. Nothing seemed so great in front of it, so terrible, as the red on that barn from so far away.

The years after he finished it were the worst years we’d seen. The price of farm products went to nothing. A bushel of wheat cost a dollar to harvest, but sold for less than half. Corn was ten cents, hogs three dollars a hundredweight. Barely a third of what we got more than ten years back. We burned grain for heat in the winters. It was cheaper than coal. When the banks closed, they raised the interest on our mortgages and most of the farmers couldn’t pay. Just imagine it. A man works a piece of land all his life. Then he loses it. It is stolen away from him. So desperate did some of them become, they decided to take things in their own hands. Up north, the farmers blocked highways, wouldn’t let a neighbor from the next town pass for trading. They dumped his cream in the ditches, his butter and eggs. They wanted to force the market, keep the produce from moving. On the railroad, they burned a truss bridge to stop the freight. I couldn’t imagine taking up such violence. It seemed as much against the government as against our own kind. But I knew the way they felt, cornered into saving themselves like that. They didn’t find such actions easy. I knew that too. All of us, we lived good safe lives. We watched over our own. We didn’t ask for much except to be left to ourselves. And we weren’t the only ones.

This was the time the tramps appeared on our roads. They wore burlap on their feet. Carried a pack of clothes and keepsakes, if they carried that much. They were from the south and west, most of them, states where the droughts had struck. They looked for work, and if they couldn’t get it, begged for food and water. Sometimes a barn for sleeping. In the mud in front of our house, they marked our path with a circle and a cross, so small a carving that I didn’t see it for months. Still, I understood what it meant. Ours was a safe house. We would open our door. Give them what we could from our pantry. In those years, we were never that far from needing the same ourselves.

“They’re covered in dust in the west,” the tramps told us. “Black blizzards. There’s a long dry spell coming.” The way they said it made us lean in to listen. They cradled their arms against the rain as if they carried a child, as later they would carry our food.

Frank listened without a word. He seemed to be listening even after the men were gone.

“They had mud on their feet, Frank,” I reminded him. “Didn’t you see? There’s so much mud here they can’t walk in the ditches. Dry spells, they’re saying, but they keep to the middle of the road.”

“There’s women with them now.”

“Well, so, there’s women.”

Frank looked down the road to where one of the men sat, hunched over and chewing a bit of our bread. Sitting on the ground, the man had soaked his pants through, but he didn’t seem to know it or care. He turned his head to the sky and tore at the bread with his teeth.

“Something else bothers me,” Frank said at last. “That new agriculture man in Washington. Secretary Wallace. He’s got the government ready to buy and slaughter all the young pigs and sows set to farrow.”

“At the end of the season?”

“Wallace came too late. Couldn’t get the bill signed before the pigs got pregnant, but he wanted it through anyway. Jack says it’ll raise prices. A lowering of production, he says. And it’s legal this time. None of that mischief like we heard of up north. They’ll even send the extra meat to the people who’re hungry for it.”

“Legal doesn’t make it right.”

“No,” Frank answered. “And the way I hear it they don’t have enough men to process what all they’ve got. The packinghouses can’t handle the smaller pigs, so they turn them to grease, if they use them at all. There’s not enough places to store the meat, either. So now there’s people starving and it’s rotting somewhere. Down in St. Louis, I heard they threw thousands of those pigs in the Missouri River. But the local association, they still want us to sell. They say anyone who doesn’t would be taking advantage, getting the raised prices off the backs of the ones who sacrifice now. And Jack, he’s all for what the association wants.”

“Since when?”

“Since he needed the money, I guess. Of course, that’s not what Jack says. He says he doesn’t want to be a traitor. Against the government, maybe, but not against his own. ‘It’s done,’ he told me. Like I didn’t have a choice.”

Frank grew quiet and I took a step back, thinking about this killing. A knife across their throats and the young ones not yet grown. That was the terrible thing. Those newborns didn’t have an ounce of meat on them. And they wanted the sows too, just because they were pregnant. It would ruin us. The kitchen empty. Frank forever thin. No sounds from the barn except its settling and the rot of what we’d taken too soon.

“I’ll not have you do it.”

“No,” he let out. I stood listening for more from him but none came. Such a wonder, the way this man could move in and out from me. But in this he was certain. “How are you going to keep them?” I asked, but I didn’t care much about the way he did it. He would figure out something. That husband of mine, he was a fine smart man. I’d known it all along. Now when he set off for the barn, I followed.

The rain of that fall closed us off from the outdoors. It kept us in the house, sleepy in the low light and bound to the stories we told. We heard more about the drought in other states. That summer we had been more than dry ourselves. But the rain had come again with a vengeance and it hadn’t stopped. Donny and Adaline, our two dark-haired children, marveled at everything. Why the rain came. When it would end. Why the floors of our house were damp, and what we kept inside the barn. We took pleasure in telling them the time of day when they asked, showed them how to count their numbers and spell out their names. We explained hot and cold, good and bad, with all the lines children want in between. In our stories we described a place we saw fit to live in, an order of things we felt to be right. Being alone, being far out in the countryside, we created the world as we wanted it, and we made ourselves the makers of everything.

I have pictures of the twins in those years, from the time they were born until they turned eleven. In one of the last, Adaline has a hand over her brother’s shoulders. Even as a child, your mother had a prettiness about her, with her father’s black hair and thinness but my own almond-colored eyes. She kept enough of me, at least, to give her some weight in front of that camera. Looking off into the darkness, Donny stands next to her as if he grew out of his sister’s skirts. He was the bigger of the two, sun-blackened and sturdy, but beneath Adaline’s arm, he folds himself square against his sister’s ribs. Like a proud old dog he looks, keeping to his owner’s side.

Since they were born, I’d brought the twins with me to call the cows in from pasture late in the afternoons, just in time for the evening milking. A month before the rains came, I heard them on the back porch getting ready alone. When I looked for them out the window, they had already headed off, a good twenty-minute walk. Cows may seem dull and slow, but they are powerful creatures. They can rush a person if they get fidgety, and back then, the twins stood only as high as the animals’ flanks. Now in early spring, it would be dark before the cows might come back home. But the twins knew the path by heart. Since fall, they’d been walking it themselves to school more than two miles out, the pasture a shortcut that led to the county road. I went along this time in case they had trouble but followed far enough behind so I couldn’t be seen. It wasn’t unusual for a farm child to take on such work. But like me and my own brothers, I knew they wanted to do it alone.

Adaline and Donny walked side by side down the scarred path, leveled by the cows’ passing. The light had dimmed, that colored, sideways kind of sun. The air smelled of metal from an early rain. When finally they could see the pasture, the twins sang at the cows from a distance. The herd crowded together by the slough where they drank the last of the snowmelt, bumping flanks. The twins came at them with their hands over their heads, their shoulders high, making themselves bigger. They circled wide around the herd on either side and drew together at the back. The cows stirred, turning their heads. They tore a last few bites of grass and then moved all at once, the lead in front, loping along. Every once in a while one of the animals startled. There would be a rush. But behind the herd the twins called out, as small as the youngest calves themselves, and the cows slowed.

I went back to the house to start dinner. Adaline and Donny would haul wood for me when they returned. They would gather peas and tomatoes in buckets from the garden and go to the well to clean them and bring them back. It was a while I was waiting for them. Finally, the two came striding in. They already had the wood in their arms and a dozen or so corncobs to keep the fire going.

“I’ve been expecting you,” I said.

“We got the wood ourselves,” Adaline answered.

“Adaline wanted to,” Donny said, and he grabbed a bucket for the vegetables. Adaline jerked her head at him and he grabbed her a bucket as well.

“Looks like you’re doing plenty yourselves.”

“Sure,” Donny answered. “We’re almost done.”

Adaline gave him a cross-eyed look. “Almost,” she said.

They went out together then, buckets clanging. Beyond the kitchen window, they crouched in the garden, digging through the dirt. They set the tomatoes in one bucket so as not to bruise them, the peas in another. When they set off to the well, Donny carried both buckets by himself. Only eight years old and those two already seemed grown. But no matter how far they went, they would be all right. As long as one had the other, I believed they always would.

During those weeks of rain, Adaline and Donny grew closer still. They walked the miles to school together with tin pails for their sandwiches and came back early to finish their chores. Being so far out, they were often alone with each other, though at times Kyle joined a half-mile along. Even after he’d finished his eighth year, Kyle went, though he hurried home soon after to help his father. There were only twelve children in that schoolhouse, most far younger and living closer in, so those three grew as dear as cousins.

The hogs stayed in the barn and the weather let them sleep. In this keeping of them, we never doubted ourselves. When we heard the animals stirring, we fed them early and well and kept all that was important in our world as close as we were able. It was a powerful time and we believed a bit in what was coming. The drought to the south and west and the trouble it would bring. But it was hard to be certain of anything outside our own hundred and eighty acres of land. Where he sat with us on our porch, Frank would sing, his voice deeper than I’d heard from him. Bring me a little water, Sylvie, he sang. Bring me a little water now.

Adaline puckered, blowing a curl from her eyes. Donny cocked his head and frowned. They sat at our feet, drawing a picture between them with a piece of charcoal. In only days it would wash off.

“That’s right,” I said. “Your father’s asking for trouble. That Sylvie has already come.”

Frank sat forward in his chair, singing, and Adaline slapped his arm.

“Aren’t you the smart one?” he laughed. He bent down and lifted them heavily to his knees. When Adaline dropped her head against Frank’s shoulder, Donny did the same. Getting mighty thirsty, Sylvie, he sang louder. Getting mighty thirsty now.

Small rivers broke the soil, the grass gone to mud. The sky hovered over us as if we should kneel under what it sent down. We were safe under that porch, wrapped in blankets and drifting, near to sleep as Frank grew quiet. Under our breath, we prayed for the rain to hold off or to stop altogether, watching for what would come.

I suppose a person should never wish for things too hard. Something bad often turns up. Sometimes when I squint at that nurse, I think Adaline is home. I can smell the same cream on her skin, like blackberries. The way she tilts her head on her thin neck. My boy, in the last few months I’ve found myself wishing for your mother so often I feared I would lose myself to it. Now Adaline is almost here again, looking sharper than herself and a bit like someone else. When the nurse brings those buckets for my bath, I try to behave as any mother might.

“That’s it,” the nurse says. “I always knew we could get along.”

I turn over for her. “I’ve made a wreck of it,” I say, but the nurse doesn’t seem to hear. The water is prickly against my back and I think I might choke. She squeezes the sponge and claps her hands when she’s finished. I wonder if she’ll ever tell me who she is. She’s nearly my age, I think, with her white hair pinned back, her square black shoes. But she’s much too thin, too quick on her feet. With me in this bed, there must be more than twenty years between us. When she dusts Kyle’s picture, she presses her face so close her breath fogs the glass.

“That’s my daughter there,” I say, reaching for the bureau. The nurse picks up the photograph behind Kyle’s, and Adaline peers out, all curly hair and drive.

“She writes me,” I say. “Sometimes she does.”

“You know where she is?”

“Not for months, now.”

“But she writes.”

“Now and then.”

The nurse looks away. “You must have an address,” she says. “When you write back?”

I lift the bed skirt, though it leaves me panting. Underneath are all your mother’s letters in a box, the ones she’s sent in envelopes and the others I’ve tried to write myself. Some are only half finished. I got tired of writing pages I couldn’t send. The nurse sorts through the box, studying the envelopes before throwing them aside. With her face so close, something about her flickers in my head, but just as soon goes out. “That girl, she’s the mother to my only grandchild.”

The nurse pauses.

“Donny,” I say and close my eyes. I feel the nurse watching me and she goes back to rustling through the box. The light turns. The front door creaks on its hinges. When I open my eyes again, the nurse is gone and I know I’ve been asleep for some time. In the dimness I can smell those blackberries, but the smell drifts. The box is under the bed, this notebook covered in dust. The photographs are back as they were, with Kyle in front. Sometimes I wonder if anyone has been here at all.

We were sitting on that porch when we first saw Jack on our road, and we knew he’d come to see us about our hogs. His hat was low on his head, spilling rain to his lips. His jacket blew from his sides as if it ran along with him. Frank sat forward in his chair, knuckles folded under his chin. “It’s him,” he said. The children grew quiet, even Jack’s youngest. Back then, that boy often escaped his father’s house and stayed at our own. I never minded keeping Kyle from Jack’s hand, not with the way he watched over the twins. Now with Jack like a stranger rising out of the weather, I hurried the children inside.

Jack took the porch steps in a single stride and threw himself into the chair I’d left. “How’re the boys?” I asked from behind the screen door. “How’s Mary?”

He took off his hat and shook it, his face pinched. The children played at the table behind me, spilling soup. Kyle shouted a dare to the twins, and they tried to drink their bowls in one swallow, losing most of it down their fronts. If not for our neighbor’s presence, I might have joined them. But Jack was stewing, scratching his thumb against a knot of wood on the porch rail.

“That’s enough, Kyle,” I called out.

“Do I have to ask?” Jack started. “You haven’t done it, have you? You’ve got to change your mind. Go in with all of us.”

“I don’t see why,” Frank said.

“We’ve already agreed, that’s why. It wouldn’t be right if one of us held out. Nobody will have his hands clean when this is done. And if you don’t come along, you’ll just ruin it for the rest of us. Make us all look bad, and you so high and mighty.”

I laughed. “You haven’t done your own yet, have you? That’s what I expect.”

Jack turned to me behind the screen, his face hard.

“What is it, Jack? You want to be sure they’re no holdouts so you can stand it better? Here you are, pretending it means nothing. But I bet you think it means plenty.”

Jack looked at me and blinked. I’d hit home, but his face covered up quick.

“You know what they did to that judge up north, Frank?” he started again. “The one who got so happy foreclosing farms? They shook a rope at him. They dragged him out of that chair in his courtroom and tarred and feathered him. Left him like that in the town square. And what they did, they did it together. Some people thought it was crazy, but it took planning. It made things happen. Now Roosevelt is listening. The president is. Not like Hoover. He only made shacks. But Roosevelt is trying to help. It’s what they’ve been fighting for, and it’s good money they pay, almost five dollars a head.”

“You’re the only one here that cares about that money,” Frank said. “That five dollars is for seventy-five percent of the herd. Only seventy-five. And it wouldn’t matter if it were a hundred. It’s a waste and you know it. You work and all you make is used. Not a bit thrown away because there’s no extra from nowhere. It’s who you are.” Frank took a hard wipe at his chin. “Once they’re gone, there’s no going back. It’ll ruin the farm selling them like that. They’re not even grown.”

Jack wasn’t looking at him. With his head down, his hat closed off most of his face. “This isn’t something you can sit around and think about, Frank.” Jack took to his feet and swept past me at the door. “Your mother wants you home,” he shouted, pulling Kyle from the table.

“Don’t you dare,” I started at him. “That boy hasn’t done anything.”

But Jack had already pushed past me again, knocking me against the wall. He was out the door then and the boy had to run to keep from being dragged. Still, Kyle did his best to keep up, almost as if he had wanted his father to fetch him. As if he craved any kind of attention from the man. The two went off together across the yard and Jack yelled back to Frank, loud as if he wanted the house, the road leading in, and the whole countryside to hear him. “You do it, Frank.”

In the days that followed, Frank crossed to the barn and back again, carrying slop. He kept a good watch over the hogs, his shoes muddy and stuck with chaff, his shirt wet, clinging to his ribs. He was slow to step into the house, covered as he was with the barn stink. My fingers grew strong with washing and his overalls ribboned. I patched them with burlap and thread.

Days and nights of this and we never could rid him of the smell of those animals. He stood in the rain and let it run from him, keeping an eye out for anyone on the road. If Jack wanted to raise a fuss, he could have sent the association to pay a visit. Every man in the association could have come on his own. But we didn’t hear a word. Only the tramps came, carrying their bread now under the front of their shirts. That mark they’d left on our path had long washed off, but I found the same circle and cross carved on our tree out front. To them, we were still good folks.

When Jack came again, it was a meeting Frank was ready for. I could tell he hadn’t slept with thinking about it, the way he bowed his head when he saw that man on our road.

“Where are they?” Jack yelled before he’d quite reached us. “I just wanted to be sure. I didn’t want you to do anything stupid.”

Frank crossed the yard to meet him, the toe of his boot knocking Jack’s own. “I’m keeping them,” Frank said.

“No, you’re not.”

“In the barn.” Frank looked at the barn, his head cocked as if listening to it. The sun broke through and Frank turned his face up and squinted, his mouth open. Weeks of rain it had been. So constant we felt drenched to our bones, our teeth swimming. Like wood, we’d swollen inside our clothes. And there it was, the bald and drying heat.

Jack was past him then, knocking Frank on the shoulder as he headed for the barn. This was what he’d meant to do from the beginning. Frank had challenged him to it. His steps were no different from the way he had walked up our road, his stare low and his hand tight against his leg. He drew out a knife and I rushed off the porch to follow him, calling out to Frank.

But Jack was quicker than me. He saw us coming. When he ducked into the barn, the hogs squealed and I knew he was at the little ones. Inside, the light was full of chaff and scurry. The horses threw their weight against the stall doors, their heads twisted to see the back wall. Jack crouched in the shadows, sweat-soaked and rising out of the pen. “Eddie,” he said, as if he’d never expected I might be the one to stop him. He held one of the babies squirming in his hands, red-faced as he was and trembling. So full of fury he didn’t seem to know what he wanted to do or how. I believed he’d always been that way, clenched against that tireless blood in him. He closed his eyes and cut into the animal, cutting his own fingers, and he threw the animal down. Then he was off again, his face streaming and a low howl in the back of his throat, ducking through the pen to get at another one. I grabbed him as he chased and he fell under me, cutting my arms with his knife. Behind us Frank yelled and the air cracked with gunshot.

Jack stiffened and let go. For a moment I believed Frank had done it. He’d shot the man. Sitting up, I held my arms close and bleeding. Jack lay on his back, his eyes swollen and red, but there wasn’t a wound on him. The fight had left him empty, and he lifted his head to see us both.

“I’m keeping them, Jack,” Frank shouted. He was breathing hard. The shotgun was heavy in his arms but he kept it aimed, ready to fire.

“No you’re not,” Jack let out. His voice was little more than a whisper now. “Not any more.”

Frank could hear the pigs before he opened the pen. He saw the dead one first and the rest, nine babies, cut up and whining. At the far end, the sow ran untouched, flies humming at her flanks. With his mouth set, Frank gave me the gun and grabbed Jack’s knife. One by one, Frank took up the babies and cut their throats to quiet them. The sow ran in circles against the wall, mad with grief and worry. Her quickness had saved her, but her shoulder was still bloody from bashing the wood, the gate shivering and about to crack as she hit it.

Frank crouched in the dirt and swept his hands over his face, watching the sow. She was tiring and soon lay down. Jack slapped his hat against his knee and groaned, the rain coming off him. Frank caught him by the throat. “If you tell anybody about that sow,” he said.

“What?”

Frank pointed Jack’s knife at him. “Don’t tempt me. It doesn’t make a difference. Pigs or Morrows. It’s all a waste and it’s killing for no reason.”

Jack hit at him and Frank let go. “What does it matter now?” Jack said. He was on his feet, wiping at his eyes and shaking. “I did what you couldn’t,” he said. “And you’ll always owe me for it. You best hurry now and take those pigs to town before they rot.”