Tallgrass (19 page)

Still, things weren’t all right. The world was more dangerous than ever. Susan’s killer was still out there, Mom was sick, and now Buddy wouldn’t be coming home until the end of the war—or maybe never. After a while, I went upstairs and got in bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I looked out the windows at the shadows, watching for any that moved. And then I slipped back down the stairs and tested the doors again to make sure they were locked.

“It’s all right, Squirt,” Dad called to me from somewhere in the darkness. “I’ve already checked them.”

IN THE MORNING, GRANNY
woke me up, whispering, “Buddy came in the night.” I was groggy, because I hadn’t slept well. I was worried about Buddy, but it had been a hot night, too, and I’d slept with a sheet between my legs to keep my sweaty knees from touching. I thought maybe I’d forget about Susan’s killer and leave the window open at night. Whoever had killed Susan didn’t seem so important anymore, now that Buddy was missing.

Since Granny sometimes had presentiments, I held my breath for a minute, wondering if a second telegram had arrived, maybe telling us that Buddy’s body had been found. Or perhaps she’d awakened and come downstairs and heard us talking about Buddy. “How do you know?” I asked.

“Lookit here. Buddy left this on my bed. He knows I like yellow.” She held up the piece of material I had placed beside her.

“How do you know Buddy left it?”

“Buddy’s dog’s on it.” Granny beamed at me.

I looked closer, and sure enough, there were tiny dogs that looked like Sabra among the little figures on the fabric.

“He put it here while I was sleeping,” Granny said.

“Are you sure?”

“I knew Buddy was coming. A man from the depot brought a telegram. That’s why I know.”

“Maybe the fabric’s from Marthalice,” I said.

“No. It wasn’t from Marthalice. Marthalice isn’t coming back. I don’t think she’s ever coming back. I remember . . .” Granny had a far-off look in her eyes. Then she blinked and smiled at the fabric. “I’ll save this for a baby quilt.” She smoothed the material with her old hand. “Somebody always has a baby.”

After she left, I went to the window and opened it, thinking that we would have to write Marthalice about Buddy. It would be hard for her, living alone, to open the letter and read about him. I thought, Maybe Mom should write to Cousin Hazel and ask her to tell Marthalice. I decided to suggest that to Mom.

The day was early yet. Dad’s shadow was long on the ground beside the chicken coop, and I could see his shadow hand throwing out feed. He must have told Mom to stay in bed while he did her chores. My chores now, I thought; I’d be taking over the chicken coop. Dad picked up a bucket and went toward the barn to milk the cows, walking slower than usual, and I wondered if he, too, had slept poorly. The barnyard was all long shadows—the two poles and wires of the clothesline at an angle like a parallelogram, the haystack like a black mountain, Sabra’s legs so long that she was a shadow colt running across the yard.

The honeysuckle bushes beside the house were in bloom, and their fragrance drifted up to my room. And there were the farm sounds I heard every morning. Calves bawled; hens clucked as they scratched in the dirt, leaving their crazy chicken-feet marks. I sat at the window a long time, winding a cowboy bandanna that Buddy had given me at Christmas through my hands. I’d slept with it on my pillow. I wondered if wherever he was, Buddy was thinking about this farm morning, and I wished he knew that we were thinking of him. But, of course, he did.

After a bit, Dad came back from the barn with the bucket of milk. He kicked at the mean old rooster who went after him. “Get away, you worthless thing, or this’ll be your last day.” Dad had named the rooster Hitler, because we were going to kill him and eat him, and he said that to Hitler every time the rooster went after him. But on this morning, Dad didn’t put much feeling into the words. He shaded his eyes with his hand and looked up at my window.

I waved the bandanna. “Hi, Daddy.”

His face was old, and his overalls hung on him as if he’d lost weight in the last few days, but he grinned at me and said, “Make that two worthless things.”

“Then how come you missed me so much?” I asked.

“Did I say that?”

“No, but you know you did.” I wanted to make him laugh.

And he did laugh a little. “Oh, I might have missed somebody following me around, getting in my way.” Dad picked up a stick and tossed it at me, but it fell short of the window. There were voices, and Dad glanced beyond the house, then looked up at me again. “Daisy and them are on the way.” His voice was thin now. “You better get down here pretty quick and help me explain about your brother.”

“WHAT’S THAT MEAN, ’MISSING
in action’?” Daisy asked, just as I had when Dad read me the telegram. Dad told her it probably meant captured, and Daisy and the boys said how sorry they were.

“Hell!” Emory said, and Dad nodded, instead of telling him to watch his language.

“It stinks,” Carl agreed.

The four of them knocked on the bedroom door and told Mom they hoped Buddy was all right. Then they stood around the kitchen, looking at the floor, the boys kicking one foot against the other, until they’d drunk their coffee. Even Daisy was silent.

Later, after Dad and Carl and Emory had left for the fields, Harry stayed behind to fix a pipe under the sink. He was always looking for some excuse to hang around Daisy. He told her that “missing” might mean Buddy was dead but that nobody’d found his body. “Sometimes they get all shot to pieces and you can’t find enough of them to make a good identification.”

“Shut up, smarty,” Daisy hissed, glancing in my direction.

“They’d know he was dead. They’d find his dog tags,” I said.

“Yeah,” Daisy added. “They’d find the dog tags.”

“Maybe he took off. Maybe he cut and run.”

“He did not!” I said, ready to take on Harry, although I knew he could beat me bloody if he wanted to.

“Hey, I was just kidding.”

“It’s not very funny. Get out of here,” Daisy told him. After he left, she said, “That dope doesn’t mean anything. He’s just mad. They put us in the camp because we’re not real Americans. Then they tell the boys if they don’t join up and fight for America, they’ll throw them in jail. Harry says that after going through the evacuation, he doesn’t have to be loyal. But the next thing you know, he wants to join the army, because it’s part of our Japanese culture to help our country. Me, I don’t understand it. I tell you, it’s like the fellow on the radio says: It pays to be ignorant.”

“Maybe you’re better off in the camp.”

Daisy gave me a long look. “Maybe we’d be better off if we had a choice.”

That made me feel smaller than five cents. One minute I was an adult, and the next I was a dumb kid. I tried to think how I’d feel if I’d been put in a place like Tallgrass, if Mom and Dad and I had been yanked off the farm and penned up behind barbed wire, with people hating us because of the color of our skin. But I couldn’t even imagine it, because, like Mom said, nobody would do that to us; we were white people.

Daisy punched me in the arm and said, “It’s okay, kid. If your brother’s lucky, maybe he’ll end up in a camp like ours.”

“What if he’s not lucky?” I asked.

“We’ll say a prayer for him,” she said, “a Methodist prayer. And Emory will say a Buddhist prayer.”

IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE
the Jolly Stitchers arrived, one by one, with their cakes and casseroles, their words of encouragement, their prayers. Mom took comfort from them, as she had before. She told Mrs. Rubey, “We do fuss with one another, but in times of trouble, we pull together. I don’t know what I’d do without my friends in this hour of need.”

I wished I had friends like that to talk to about Buddy, but all I had was Betty Joyce, and I’d barely seen her all summer. Edna Elliot wasn’t likely to call on me.

“You know we care, every last one of us. I don’t know what it is about women that makes us so ornery, but when times are hard, we can count on each other. Try to remember that,” Mrs. Rubey said. She was such a nice lady that I wondered how she could be married to a bigmouthed dope like Mr. Rubey and have that nincompoop Edgar for a son.

They both laughed, and Mom said, “I will try.” And they laughed again. Then after she left, Mom put her head against the pillow and tears ran down her face. I knew how she felt. One minute I laughed, and the next I couldn’t stop crying. It would be easier if we just knew where Buddy was, I thought.

“The truth is, he might be better off in a prison camp with a roof over his head than sitting in a foxhole in the rain, his feet getting the foot rot, with those Germans and Eye-talians shooting at him,” Mrs. Davidson told her, and Mom nodded in agreement. Although Mrs. Davidson had refused to come to our house when Dad hired Carl and Harry and Emory, she told Mom she’d put her principles aside because Mom needed her presence now. Perhaps Mom did.

“And who knows, maybe Bud’ll be hired out to a farmer, just like the boys at Tallgrass,” Mom said.

“Why, I hadn’t thought about that. With any luck, he’ll find an employer like Mr. Stroud. Wouldn’t that be awfully fine? I’ll ask the Lord not to send him to a family like the Jacks.” They both laughed.

It seemed to be an unspoken agreement that “missing in action” meant Buddy had been captured. Nobody told Mom that he might have been killed and his body lost, and I never mentioned to her or to Dad what Harry had said about Buddy getting shot into so many pieces that he couldn’t be identified, although they both must have thought about that. Neither one of them would have believed for a minute that Bud had deserted. We all knew that Bud wouldn’t have done that.

Bird Smith came in the afternoon. She walked through the door without knocking and called in a loud voice, “Are you up, Mary Stroud? I wouldn’t want to wake you.”

“Tell her I’m awake now,” Mom said when I went into the bedroom to check.

“So he’s went and got hisself caught. Your boy ain’t no coward to surrender. No coward at all,” Mrs. Smith announced, taking the pin out of her hat and setting the hat on the dresser. “I’ll sit, because my knees don’t hardly hold me. It’s the arthritis,” she added, pronouncing the word
arthur-itis.
Mrs. Smith took a quilt square out of her pocketbook, smoothed it with her fingers, and began to stitch on it. I never knew how someone with hands as big as ham bones could make such tiny stitches.

“I never thought he was a coward,” Mom told her.

“That’s the spirit. There’s not a thing wrong with giving up. Anybody asks, you tell them I said so.” Mom’s as likely to do that as I am to get drafted, I thought. “I’ve come to cheer you,” Mrs. Smith added.

“You have already, Bird.” Mom glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. I thought that what Mrs. Smith had said was so preposterous, it had indeed cheered Mom.

“Have you started you a remembrance quilt? You could make your blocks with jeeps and flags and soldier boys, anything you want. I find piecing takes away the pain,” Mrs. Smith said.

“Why, I hadn’t even thought about that. Bird, you’ve made my heart better than anything has since I read the telegram.”

Mrs. Smith beamed. “And I brought cookies for you to send to him.”

“Of course you did,” Mom said. “I can always count on you.” After Mrs. Smith left, Mom told Dad, “By the time we figure out how to get a box to Bud in prison camp“—she took a deep breath, as if she had forced herself to say that without flinching— “those cookies will have turned to sawdust.”

Dad looked at the waxed-paper packet of cookies on the bed beside mother, untied the string, and bit into one. “They already have,” he said. “But the chickens aren’t too particular.” I was in the kitchen then and heard Mom begin to cry again, then sniff and say, “I’ve got to get hold of myself. We’ve put a heavy burden on Rennie.”

“I believe she can handle it,” Dad told her. “She’s the strongest of the lot.”

“I’d like to let her be a child awhile yet.”

That gave me a start, because I was closer to being a woman than a child. But Dad said, “She’s not a child anymore, Mary. She hasn’t been for a while yet.”

“I know,” Mom said. “I wonder if she resents it.” I didn’t anymore. With Mom sick and Buddy missing, I didn’t mind doing my part.

WHILE THE WOMEN WENT
to the house, the men came into the barnyard or stopped along the road near where Dad was working.

“It don’t mean he’s dead. No, sir, it don’t,” Sheriff Watrous told Dad, slapping his straw hat against his leg and wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. I was hanging up laundry a little ways away from them.

“I appreciate that,” Dad said.

“Funny how the good ones get sent over and the culls like Pete Elliot and Beaner Jack get deferments. I guess Bud could have got hisself a deferment as a farm worker, too, but he’s just too patriotic. Course, as an American, I’d rather have Bud fighting for me overseas than them other two.”

Dad didn’t reply, just leaned against the wagon and inspected a harness. The sheriff squinted off into the distance before he turned his face up to the sun, and the two of them stood there for several minutes. Women got edgy when they weren’t talking, but men seemed comfortable with silence. They didn’t have to talk unless they had something to say. I couldn’t decide which way was better.