Plains Song (6 page)

Very briefly they had a problem with eggs, since Emerson firmly believed the yolk concealed a live but featherless chicken. His eggs had to be fried to the hardness of meat, and sliced with a knife, like cheese. Nothing would budge him. He would not touch an egg that he could penetrate with his fork's edge. Both Emerson and Orion liked their potatoes in a white sauce, their peas in a white sauce, and their biscuits served with pan gravy, the biscuits used to wipe the plate clean, like the tongue of a dog.

Cats appeared before stray dogs, however, prowling around the sheds, skulking across the yard, or furtively competing with the chickens for the food she threw out with the dishwater, hissing like snakes. Cora did not welcome cats, having heard of the way they stole the breath of babies asleep in their cradles, but Emerson, of all people, encouraged them to gather around him in the barn at milking time. A few would stand erect, exposing their undersides to be squirted with milk from the cow's teat, then draw back into the shadows to lick it off. He was not averse to dipping his hand into the frothing pail, then letting the cats lick it clean to the wrist. Along the trail from the barn to the house, both pails sweeping the weeds, the cats followed along so nimbly even Cora spied on them, their tails up stiff as a cane with a crook at the end. Time taken for such idle pleasure, although for just a moment, required that she apply herself harder to whatever she was
doing, more pressure to the crank of the cream separator, the clothes wringer, or the handle of the broom. She was not one to criticize idleness in others and indulge in it herself.

Observation assured Cora that chickens were stupid, but how had she ever begun the day without them? They were
her
chickens: where they laid their eggs was her responsibility. Missing her from the house, or seeing her only dimly, a long striding phantom in the dusk of the evening, Orion understood she was looking for the eggs it seemed the purpose of the hens to hide. Brought into the house in the sling of her apron, they were stored in a syrup pail until Sunday, at which time, seated on the porch, she would remove the dung spots with a scrape of her thumbnail, then bury them in sawdust in the storm cave. Emerson would sell these eggs to a grocer in Battle Creek, and bring back to her, in silver, the proceeds. This was
her
money, which she stored in a bowl that might be used for sugar on special occasions. Joshingly Emerson asked her what she meant to do with it. Was that a mistake? When he came in from the fields a few weeks later, he found the porch screen latched and had to rap on it. His shoes were caked with field dirt. She asked him to take them off. Behind her he saw, gleaming as if wet, the linoleum that covered the floor of the kitchen, brightly colored as Christmas paper. Wasn't it to walk on? he asked. While it was new, she replied, they would walk on it with their shoes off. This proved to both clean it and give it a polish. Her pleasure in this possession was tempered by her knowledge that
it bordered on display. Dr. Geltmayer was the first to walk on it in his shoes. With a cleverness that shamed her, Cora explained that the plank floor was drafty in the winter and the crawling child sometimes picked up splinters. It reassured her to learn that he had such refinements in his own house.

Often the chores were so demanding Cora simply lacked the time to churn the cream which was yellow as butter. Orion poured it like syrup on his pancakes; if it soured, he ate it spread on his biscuits. He washed both corn bread and her shortcake down his throat with gulps of buttermilk. From all of this, to her surprise, he suffered no ill effects. He took a boy's delight in the slip and suck of his boots in the deep manure of the cow manger, as thick and dark as chewed tobacco. In the open fields she often heard him singing at his work.

Nothing astonished her so much as watching Emerson with the child. He made faces with closed eyes, his thumbs in his ears, the fingers wagging as he brayed hee-haw like a donkey. He made a face with open eyes, the lips forming a round O, suddenly exploding in a loud
Ah-chooo!
that startled Beulah Madge silly. This gave her hiccups, which had to be treated by slapping her on the bottom until she burped, or letting her hang like a rabbit by the heels. He covered his face with his hands, peering at her through the slits between his fingers, her eyes so wide and staring Cora feared they might pop. Placed to straddle his knee, her tiny hands gripping his fingers, the child would bounce until she was dizzy. But if Cora said, “Here
now, I'll take her,” how she would howl. It was comical how much she looked like him. Placed on her back in the crib, she would squirm in such a manner the hair was slow to grow at the crown of her head. It troubled Cora to see them both from the rear, their heads bald as targets. It also seemed to Cora that the child was slow to talk, but how would she know? During the church service other infants she saw either slept or howled, their faces red as cherries. When she hesitantly hinted at her concern, Emerson harumphed, pleased as if he had been tickled, reminding her that the problem with a female child was to shut them up once they started talking. Actually, it pleased her, on a trip to Battle Creek, to see the vanity he showed selecting a new straw hat, allowing the salesman to move around behind him so that he could see the rear view in a mirror. His hair had been cut, the scalp white as a bandage above his dark, weathered neck.

The summer chores were demanding, each day long and exhausting, but never long enough for her to catch up. Too tired to sleep, she would sometimes rise from bed and go below to sit in her rocker. In the moonlight the white trim on the barn's doors and windows stood free of the barn, and seemed to come toward her. It was eerie what she saw, or thought she saw, one night. Her husband, Emerson, moving like a sleepwalker, came down the stairs and passed unseeing before her, crossing the yard to the privy, where he sat with the door open, his legs white as paint. On his way back he paused to dip water from the pail and take several deep swallows, his Adam's apple pumping.
It troubled Cora that he would seldom bother to skim off the flies. He had belched, then said, “What a woman needs is one thing, but what a farm needs is another.” She had been too startled to reply. He spoke as if he saw her right there before him, at the door to the porch. She thought he meant to go on and she waited, hushed, while he tossed a dipper of water at the bugs cluttering the screen. Somewhere in the barn, or behind it, she heard the moaning caterwauling of the cats. Their piercing ear-splitting shrieks no longer dismayed her. How well she had come to understand it! Nothing known to her had proved to be both so bizarre and so repugnant as the act of procreation, but she understood that it was essential to its great burden of meaning. In the wild, cats shrieked. In the bedroom Cora had bitten through her hand to the bone. Dimly she gathered that Emerson, in speaking as he did, wanted her to know that she had failed him. What a farm needed was sons. She had borne a daughter, to be fed and clothed, then offered on the marriage market. Who would be there to run the farm as they grew old? Nothing in Emerson's nature assured her that he would not repeat the first experience, but the passage of time, the consoling rut of habit, had dulled the terror and anxiety she had once felt. He did not move toward her. He did not caress or strike her. He lay awake with his thoughts or he slept, or he snored, as if they had reached an understanding. Was she right in thinking he had spoken as he did to relieve her of the burden of his expectations? They were heavy within her. They weighed her down more than
the child. Had he spoken to her as he did so that she would feel free to go back to bed, or so that she would share a burden too great for him to bear alone? She didn't know. It sometimes seemed to her she knew him less than if they had never met. Nevertheless, what had happened, or what had not happened, took on for her the importance of a religious ceremony: her feet seemed nailed to the floor, she could neither rock the chair nor rise from it. This awesome, aching silence would be broken by Emerson, scratching himself inside his underwear, then seeming to forget what time it was and taking the clock from the range to wind it, saying aloud, “Why, dang, I already done that,” and proceeding upstairs.

The fall harvest was so abundant the temporary house was converted to a grain shed to store it. The doors were locked shut and the grain was shoveled through the stovepipe hole in the roof. Sacks of corn were stored in the loft of the barn and the upstairs bedrooms, attracting the mice, for which Cora set traps. More often than not these creatures proved to be so clever they set off the traps and ate the bait. Curious to observe the little thieves at their work, Cora lay awake, wide-eyed, her gaze fastened on the traps in the hallway. The mouse that set them
off proved to be Orion. She heard him whispering and actually encouraging the mice. He would make scratching sounds on the floor to bring them out of their holes. Cora felt neither affection nor compassion for creatures that took from her what was rightfully hers. A mouse caught in the house, a rabbit in her garden, or a coon in her storm cave was an offense to her nature. Against the forces aligned against her she felt, like Emerson, there were no truces. If for a day or a night she faltered, they made measurable gains.

With his share of the crop Orion bought a saddle horse, a new Winchester rifle, and took off for the Ozarks. Even Cora was dismayed by such flaws in his nature: was he a hillbilly or a farmer? After three weeks he might have returned empty-handed if he had not had an accident while hunting. Stalking deer, Orion had crawled through a dense tangle of poison oak. Lacking experience with it he scratched, and the infection spread to all parts of his body, including his scalp. A local girl, Belle Rooney, immune to the poison, was wonderfully efficient in caring for him. Cora knew nothing of all this until they appeared, with his horse and a wagon piled with what they would need to begin housekeeping, although they had no house. A girl with coal-black hair and a hillbilly manner (the pitch of her voice deafened Cora), she cast her eyes about nervously as she talked; the front of her soiled blouse lacked buttons. Cora thought her wild and unkempt in appearance, her black hair disheveled as an unruly child's. She did not wear bloomers. Most of
what little Cora had heard of hill people seemed confirmed.

Belle was not afraid of work, however, and couldn't seem to get enough of child caring and tending. She spent most of her day in Cora's dining room or kitchen, fondling and fussing with Beulah Madge. Orion explained her own mother was dead, and she had been the one to tend and raise six smaller children. She liked all babies, but she loved Beulah Madge. It was a great help to Cora to be free of child tending while there was so much to be done elsewhere. Emerson said, surprising her, that now she had an old one and a young one. With his own plowing to do, he was no help to Orion, who had to find a hired hand to help with the house building. One of them Scandahoovians, as Emerson called him, he came to and from Cora's table without a word. Of what extraction he was, if he had people somewhere, if he intended to settle or move on westward, neither Orion nor Cora heard him say, although he would nod his head in answer to questions. He took pains to empty and rinse his own wash pan, but a towel was soaked wet once he had wiped his hands, face, and huge ears. He started his hammering and sawing when there was light enough to see, and would work in the darkening twilight after supper. It was the same as having two men working different shifts. Of course, Orion, just as Emerson had feared, had to have himself a house with a basement, but as soon as the first floor was nailed down the hired hand made himself at home in it. It distressed Cora to see the way he carried nails in his
mouth. A man who did that most of his life might find he had lost the power to speak his own language, whatever it was. What Orion paid him he put into his pocket and had no occasion or opportunity to spend. Just when Cora had grown accustomed to his presence at the table, he was gone, and she missed him, much as it had distressed her to see the sawdust at the roots of his hair when he bowed for grace.

With a place of her own, Belle Rooney still spent most of her day with Cora and Madge. She did what Cora told her, or she cunningly managed not to do it, as a clever child might. Brown sugar disappeared from the crock in the cupboard, and honey from the comb stored in the storm cave. Belle had cravings. “I just don't know what I'd do without sweeteners,” she said, as if she ever did. She helped herself to change from the sugar bowl the way a child would take cookies from a jar in the pantry. With it she bought ribbons, pins, and cheap jewelry to make herself pretty. Cora was amazed. She could not understand this need for self-display. Nor when new buttons were attached to her blouse did Belle manage to keep them buttoned.

“Now look here,” Cora would say, and button her up, but it left no impression. It vexed Cora, but did not make her angry. She might as well try to take a stitch in the weather. After all, there was no one to see her but Cora, Orion, and the grubbing Madge. Emerson seemed unaware that she was there. He had not been consulted in the matter of their marriage, and it was his way of ignoring that it had happened. A woman like Cora would have taken offense, but Belle was like
a wild creature among those she liked, both friendly and indifferent to those who didn't like her. Not many, though, were indifferent; the men at the Sunday service followed her with their eyes.