Fervent Charity (25 page)

Alvinia lightened. “Don’t remind me!”

“You promised the girl.”

“I know and I’ll keep my promise.” Alvinia shook her head at the mysteries of the world, which mostly were the things she couldn’t control. “Well, this custard looks about right. Lavonne!”

Alvinia’s fourteen-year old daughter came into the kitchen. Lavonne was looking more and more like Betty, although she probably wouldn’t be as tall. She nodded politely to Lena and said, “Yes, Mama?”

Alvinia transferred the custard from her pan to a large mixing bowl. “Take this out to your brother and put the batch he’s working on in the ice house. Now do it like I showed you, honey, so it doesn’t melt. Then you can go out with your friends. I’ll look after the little ones.” Lavonne’s face transformed like prairie sky from clouds to sun. “Okay, Mama!”

Lena finished her coffee and put the cup in the sink. “Well, I’ll go back out and see what I can do out there.”

“I’ll go check on Kermit. I don’t want him stuck all day in here, either. The chickens should have some fun.” Lena found Gracia and Kirstin still happily occupied with some rubber blocks.

The shower had passed but the sky was still as thick as Alvinia’s custard. A tent had gone up and Percy and Barney were under it, still nagging each other over whose turn it was.

Alvinia followed Lena out the door and said, “Percy, you’ve been sitting in front of that checker board long enough. Come in here and take a turn at this ice cream. We all know you’re going to eat your share.”

Percy gave his ample stomach a good-natured pat. “You’re right about that, Alvinia. Just give me two moves to beat this fella and I’ll be right there.”

Barney winked at Alvinia, made a move and Percy made his next move. Then Barney with a quiet smile, picked up a black checker and hopped over a string of red ones and triumphantly swept the board clean.

Percy looked dumb-founded. “Well, maybe I’ll have better luck with the ice cream. Good game, Barney, good game. Come back later and give me a chance to beat you again!” Both men laughed and Barney headed toward the fairgrounds and the food tables, and Percy obediently followed Alvinia into his house. Lena didn’t know where Lillian was but she was probably, now that she thought of it, watching her sons play baseball.

Lena liked baseball herself. She used to watch Will play, but since he lost his eye, he couldn’t see the ball, either to hit it or catch it. Still, she liked to watch other people play. She decided she had better use the outhouse first. The closest one was the Bierschback’s at the end of a narrow stone path back of the house. Percy had planted some bushes around it, but they weren’t tall enough yet to be much of a windbreak. She went in and settled herself in the semidarkness.

After a moment, she heard some laughter and the voices of two men approaching from the back. She recognized the voices of Bud Hedke, the barber and Arnold Prieb, who with his wife Janelle, ran the post office.

“Here, you want another snort?” That was Bud, and if his wife Dorothy found out he was drinking, he’d be in for it.

“Don’t mind if I do. Don’t let the missus catch you with that.” Arnold, it seemed, had been thinking Lena’s thoughts and she smiled.

“Don’t intend to.”

Lena’s thoughts wandered and she tuned out the voices of the men until she heard Arnold say, “Wonder who’s going to take it over now she’s gone.”

“Don’t know.”

“Who owns it? She was only renting as far as I heard.”

Lena knew at once what house they were referring to. The house, which was more like a shack, could be seen from across the fairgrounds to the west on the other side of the road. It was the only empty house around Charity that she knew of. She had heard that Stella Ronshagen had left town. Lena didn’t know and didn’t care why or where she went.

“Maybe Lester Evenson and his bank own it.”

“Well,” it was Arnold talking now, “It’s a loss in community entertainment.”

Both men chuckled.

“I’ll tell you, the Kaisers’ll sure miss that one.” Bud had had too much to drink. His words were slurring.

Arnold snickered, which encouraged Bud to go on, “You know what they’re saying—it’s the first time the Kaiser brothers ever drilled the same hole!”

Barely restrained laughter.

“You mean Walter and—”

“No. The other two.” The voices were coming around the side of the outhouse. “Not Walter, far as I heard.” One of the men rattled the door. Lena was frozen on her seat.

“And I always say,” Bud’s mouth ran more than when he was sober, “I always say, if they go out for it, it generally means they don’t get it at home.”

Arnold Prieb said, “Well, whoever is in there ain’t coming out soon enough for me. I’ll just go back over there and take a leak. Thanks for the snort.”

“You bet.”

The men went their separate ways.

Lena’s eyes, accustomed now to the dim interior of the outhouse saw with perfect clarity the slats barely joined so that the wind drifted through the seams and chinks. Light seeped around the door that drooped slightly on its hinges. Holes carved high in the two front corners allowed entrance to two more thin streams of light. In the far upper right corner was a spider web. Lena did not see the spider. No doubt she was waiting in the dark of the deep corner for her next victim. A gust of air came through the hole and sent a tremor through the web.

Lena’s feet didn’t even touch the rough hewn floor.
Like a child on a throne,
she always said of herself in the toilet. The air was saturated with the familiar smell of human excrement. Lena felt the appropriateness of her seat now, hearing what she had heard. A single board with a hole carved out of it was all that kept her suspended over a shit hole as she added her own shit to the pile.

Lena rose, cleaned herself with a sheet from the stack of papers in the corner and arranged her clothing. She came out into the daylight that wasn’t bright enough to make her blink. The hazy air lay over the land like a veil. She felt like her insides had been rearranged. She felt…she didn’t have a word for it. What word covered so much ground? What word covered friends and neighbors speaking of her humiliation as a joke and blaming her for it to boot? What word covered the ground of hurt, of wounded pride, and betrayal by people she had thought of as friends since she had come to live in Charity as a new bride? She wasn’t part of Charity any more. She’d live here, but except for going to church she would keep to herself. She would never forgive them. Not one of them. Never in this world. And she knew that she would be called to answer for that someday, too.

Riding Moon with Gracia in her arms, after she had cried so bitterly, first by herself, and then to Jordis, she had resolved that never in her life would she shed another tear for Will Kaiser, and now that promise kept itself. Her eyes were dry stones. She felt a bleak sense of loss, of groundlessness. She remembered the white horse, her gentle step, her smooth gait. She had a good name, that horse. Lena wished now for her wide back to rest upon and her white mane to hang on to. To ride her forever to the moon and beyond.

If she weren’t a mother she would leave. She’d leave Will. She’d leave this town. She would just disappear. Mary had done it. Lena would have done it too. But not with a child. She could go hungry, but she wouldn’t make Gracia want for anything.

She would never tell anyone what she had heard, and no one would ever know why she hated Bud Hedke even more than she hated Harlan Gudierian.

She walked west to the Sauer house. She had spotted Granville and Ethel Sauer on the fairgrounds earlier. She doubted that anybody would be there, and she needed to be alone.

She entered through the back door. Her feet moved and she moved with them, feeling heavy and a hundred years old. She passed through the kitchen and in the dining room, pulled out a chair and sat down at the table, running her hand absently back and forth over the creamy linen table cloth. On any other day she would have admired this cloth, and Ethel’s blue and white china shining softly through the glass of her china hutch, Ethel’s wine colored carpets, her furnishings. But not today. Today, in one of the finest homes in Charity, Lena sat amidst ashes.

She felt alone, and resolved to be so. She already had her understanding with Will. She didn’t have to go over that bridge again. She would never look at any of these people the same again, except Alvinia and of course Gustie. She knew enough of them to know that they would never allow such talk in their presence, as she herself had silenced the pious ladies of the Ruth and Esther Circle when they aired their views once about the new school teacher, Augusta Roemer. Lena had told them off good that day.

She would keep herself upright and make sure that Gracia would have the best she could offer and never be ashamed of her mother at least, and protect her from the nastiness of this town called Charity.

She raised her head to have one look at Ethel’s china before leaving this house. She didn’t expect to ever set foot inside it again. She did not long so much for the things Ethel had that she could display and polish―her dishes and her furniture―but for what these things represented to Lena. A home full of love and laughter. Granville and Ethel were a happy couple with happy children. They seemed always to have a house full of people, and on Christmas, this house was always brightly lit and full of music, even though they were Methodists.

She would see if Alvinia needed help, then gather up Gracia and go home. She had to strain her eyes to see the pattern on the china plates. It was awfully dim in this room. It shouldn’t be, not with that big window—the double window with its curtains drawn back so nothing obstructed the light or the view across the fields. Lena stood and turned slowly toward that window. Through it she saw clearly, against the greenish-yellow sky—a huge funnel cloud, its tail whipping the ground like an angry snake. Gray and brown with bits of stuff swirling around in it, like chunks of dirt in dirty milk. The thing was indescribably huge and coming fast.

Lena had no time to run. She dropped to the floor, rolled under the table and covered her head with her arms. She felt a rumbling, and a roar, like the sound of a train, filled her ears, except instead of hearing it from the depot platform, she was face down on the tracks. She squeezed her eyes shut, gritted her teeth against the fearful howling and tried to remember the Lord’s Prayer. The house tipped. She stretched out her arms and grabbed the table legs and held on, keeping her head down and her eyes shut. She smelt something gassy and then had trouble breathing at all.

She had no idea how long she lived inside that roar, gripping the table legs. One corner of the house was lifted up enough so she felt the slant but not enough so that the oak table moved. She hung on anyway to keep from sliding out from under it. She didn’t want to be left uncovered to be hit by falling glass and God knew what. Within that eternity, she began to find, one at a time, the words of the Lord’s Prayer. By the time she got to
Hallowed be
, the roar ceased, leaving silence rushing in her ears.

At the same time the house settled gently, as if a big child had picked it up to look under it and then been scolded and told to put it back down so as not to break anything. She could breathe easily again. That was the good thing, she thought, about a big sturdy house like this—it could withstand almost anything. She relaxed her grip on the table and drew in her hands. They were numb. She flexed them to get the feeling back in and the stiffness out. She crawled out from under the table and tried to get to her feet. She had to use the table to pull herself up. Her legs felt weak. As she did so, panic hit her like another storm, almost bringing her to her knees again. A tornado could pass by one house, leaving it unscathed, and take another standing right next to it. Gracia was next door at the Bierschback’s.
Oh,
please God, please God
let that house still be there
.
Please…

Her dread was engulfed in pure amazement at the sight outside the big dining room window. Rather, the opening that had been a glass-paned window. The glass was gone. Nothing looked the same. The two small trees that were in the Sauer’s back yard were not there. The fields beyond were blue. She staggered through the kitchen to the back door. The door itself was gone and so were the steps leading up to it.

She hung on to the door frame and looked out and saw the long bodies of a dead tiger and a dead lion. They were being moved, or rather arranged, side by side, with care by a bunch of men. A half a dozen large, scrawny dogs, all varying shades of yellow and gold mulled around and just as many lay dead on the ground. Besides the men who were arranging the big cats, strange people were huddled together, crying, and some picked through the rubble. There was something odd about all these people. Two children in red, shabby coats turned to look at her. She gasped. They had terrifyingly old faces.

She lowered herself to the ground, wandered out a few paces, and stood taking in a landscape in which nothing made sense. “Am I dead?” she asked no one in particular.

“No.” The answer came in a woman’s voice from her left. Lena turned and saw her sitting on a crate. Her yellow hair frizzed around her face and lay down her back in a mat like a beaver tail. She was wearing only a bustier and some frothy petticoats, tattered and dirty, in faded pink and yellow. She was smoking a cigarette and blood formed a trail down the side of her head.

Lena stared at the woman.
I must be dead
. But this sure wasn’t anything like she expected to find in heaven or in hell. Maybe the Catholics were right all along. This was purgatory.

“You’re in Cleremont.” The woman spoke dully, without inflection, but in an accent that sounded familiar.

“Cleremont?” Lena had been born on a sodbuster’s farm not five miles outside of Cleremont. This couldn’t be Cleremont. Cleremont was a whistle stop seven miles east of Wheat Lake.

The woman dropped her cigarette on the ground and watched it smolder. “The twister just set your house down like a cherry on a cake right there five minutes ago. Anybody else in there with ya?” Now Lena placed the accent. It was similar to Dennis Sully’s, but more drawn out somehow.