The Last Letter (43 page)

It didn’t take long. Ruthie bled to death with Jeanie talking to her, telling her to hang on, that it would stop. Jeanie felt as though a bad joke was upon her, the amount of death was astonishing, even though she’d heard of prairie deaths, and deaths in childbirth were not uncommon, but still, so much at one time, it strangled her. She lay on Ruthie, her fingers in Ruthie’s neck, feeling for her pulse. She felt a thud of pressure and Jeanie felt swept by forgiveness. She couldn’t believe she was party to so many deaths—just being in the presence of death again made her feel responsible.

Jeanie found a patch of softness in her heart and told Ruthie she forgave her, but Ruthie didn’t respond.

“I forgive you Ruthie, I forgive you, I forgive you.” Jeanie shook Ruthie, pushing her face side to side. “Please hear me. Do something to show me you hear me.” Jeanie sat back on her knees, face upturned to the sky, crying, feeling a different kind of grief, the sort that only comes from one inflicting pain instead of absorbing it. She’d not been an awful person until the time on the prairie. There, she’d been transformed into a person she didn’t recognize nor did she want to.

Jeanie was sorry Ruthie died, that Yale had too, in that instant of death, Jeanie’s heart yielded toward Ruthie then hardened again that it took death for Jeanie to realize her own stubbornness.

Once Jeanie went dry, the paper that had been in Ruthie’s pocket fluttered in a gentle wind. Jeanie picked it up and noticed Frank’s handwriting hidden by the folded crease.

“I’m sorry, Ruthie, but I have to read this.”

Dearest Ruthie,

My love, my soul
—
both live with you even when I don’t.

Jeanie covered her mouth, her hands shook as she read what she knew she didn’t want to know.

I’ll be gone for a short time, to set about making a life for us in Texas. I’m heartbroken that you can’t travel, but that baby inside of you
—
our sweet gift from God
—
is too precious to risk. I will forsake my family for you, as it can only damage them all to live a lie right in their presence. It will be better this way. For everyone. I’ll be back for both of you and we will spend our days contemplating the beauties of nature
—
the kind that sprouts white and puffy out of Texas dirt, the kind that lives within the two of us, holding hearts over many lonely miles.

Love, dearly,

Your Frank

Jeanie couldn’t feel the final loss of her marriage. She was dry, empty, singed inside, with nothing but a mind whose sole quest was to figure out how to keep the rest of her family together, so they wouldn’t all perish in squalor.

Ruthie’s baby let out a cry, startling Jeanie. She shushed the child, petting her head. Jeanie didn’t think Ruthie’s infant would last more than a few minutes, with the way she laid there, limp.

Jeanie pulled Ruthie’s pocket out, to put the letter back inside. She noticed a round glass button—the pasque flower paperweight button, and another paper—a train ticket to Seattle with a transfer to Vancouver, British Columbia. Jeanie covered her mouth, tasted blood that spackled her hand. Ruthie
hadn’t
been lying.

She was on her way out of the country, to Canada. Jeanie buckled at the thought. It was her fault. If Jeanie had accepted Ruthie’s apology, she might have had the strength to survive. The button. Lutie’s lavender dress had been missing its buttons when they found her the morning of her death. All but one. Jeanie couldn’t fathom why Ruthie felt it important to keep, but Jeanie stashed it in her pocket, knowing she wouldn’t part with it.

Jeanie hadn’t thought another exposure to grief could actually add pain. But there it was, building. How could she live with Ruthie’s death on her hands? She could have gotten help. Done something besides let the woman die, in pain, emotionally alone. She had begged Jeanie for forgiveness and she’d denied it, felt power in denying it. The shame Jeanie felt stopped her breath. She wretched, vomiting amid the red soil.

The letter. Frank was coming back for Ruthie. How could she explain this? Jeanie felt as though she’d killed Ruthie and though she knew she hadn’t she wasn’t sure that guilt wouldn’t be draped upon her, pointing to her as murderer, negligent at the very least. She was a murderer.

She said the word aloud to see if it fit.

Jeanie dragged Ruthie’s body into the shade of the tree. She wanted to clean her body, to make her body presentable. But there was no way to do that. Next, Jeanie lay Ruthie’s baby in the crook of her dead arm. Then she lay Yale in the crook of Ruthie’s other arm, hoping that eternity might be a little easier in the arms of a mother, even if Jeanie had so recently despised that mother’s very being.

She ran back to the dugout and retrieved a shovel and a wet cloth. Jeanie was glad Katherine and Tommy were still at the Zurchenko’s. She didn’t want them to be part of another burial, she didn’t want to explain how she was the cause of Yale’s death, Ruthie’s death and soon, Ruthie’s baby. And if they knew Ruthie died, well, she didn’t want to deal with that or the baby she’d born on behalf of their father. Jeanie despised the man, but she wouldn’t let her children know that. She would not let them feel the disappointment and rejection she had felt when she learned the truth about her own father.

By the time she returned with the shovel and began poking at the stony ground, Jeanie was sobbing, wondering how to tell her children she’d let them down as much as their father. How could she claim herself a mother if she allowed her baby to starve to death or didn’t help her fight a sickness she hadn’t even realized was there?

The shovel bounced up with every throw-down, but Jeanie found the digging came easy because of the spring thaw. Jeanie heard a cry, but wrote it off as her mind playing tricks. Then she heard it again, coming from behind. She turned and her mouth fell open at the sight of stone-dead Ruthie and Yale, while Ruthie’s baby jerked and pulled in her limbs, scrunching her face in disdain. Jeanie crept to the baby, unbelieving of what she saw and heard.

She bent down and poked Ruthie’s baby. It scolded Jeanie with another wail.

“Oh my,” Jeanie said. “You’re alive.”

Jeanie cocked her head and stared at the naked, blood-encrusted baby and marveled at her. Jeanie slid her hands under the baby and picked her up, holding her in the air, turning her back and forth, looking for defects.

“You are alive,” Jeanie said again. She unbuttoned her blouse and put the baby to her breast to nurse. The strong suck that Yale never quite achieved pulled at every inch of Jeanie’s being, the sensation on her breast spread throughout her body. This child would live and she’d be motherless because of Jeanie.

After nursing the baby, she settled her back in Ruthie’s arm and continued to dig, trying to discern what she was to do with a dead mother and a live baby. After digging as deep as she could, partly running into one of the caskets they’d laid there earlier that year, Jeanie still had no answer.

She settled Ruthie’s body into the grave, making her look as though she was comfortable in her death. She positioned Yale inside Ruthie’s arm and then closing her eyes she threw the dirt over the bodies, promising Ruthie that she would find a home for her baby if Ruthie would find a home in the afterlife for Yale. “Take care of my girl. I’ll take care of yours.”

As Jeanie filled the hole, the repetitive spattering of dirt over Ruthie and Yale’s skin was sickening. In just several months, Jeanie had buried her first born and last daughter. How had her life arrived at such circumstances? How could it be?

Chapter 21

1905
Des Moines, Iowa

Though Katherine didn’t read any of Templeton’s letters during the time she sat at her mother’s bedside holding her hand, swimming in confusing memories, she knew she would eventually. Jeanie was lucid for only minutes before she fell back into oblivion. Katherine sat for hours, hoping she might come back to tell her what she needed to know. But it became clear for the time being, she was either going further into death or resting up for another moment of clarity.

While she sat with her mother, Katherine tried to piece the events of the prairie back together. She couldn’t do it though, and it became clear that she first had to read the attic letters, needed to try to understand why her mother had decided to burn them, why Katherine herself would have been compelled to lift them out of the fire and tuck them away where her mother would never see them again. And why would her father write to Ruthie Moore, why would her mother have that letter?

Jeanie stared at her mother’s relatively smooth face. She should have been more wrinkled to have death courting her so hard. Katherine touched her mother’s cheek, its softness made a smile flit to her mouth.

Eventually, Katherine trudged up the attic steps and settled back into the spot she’d vacated the day before. Aleksey had made three stacks of letters, not in any order. On top was the one that didn’t fit with the rest. From an address in Texas to Ruthie Moore. Katherine’s hand shook while holding it, as though she knew what was written inside was something she didn’t want to know. But the feeling that she
had
to know won out and Katherine opened the letter.

Katherine’s eyes fell over the words and then she reread and reread.
What
was she seeing? She traced the words with her finger.

“Baby.” Katherine’s hands shook and she dropped the letter, curling into a ball. “Baby.” She bounced her forehead off her knees as though doing so would make her thoughts untangle. Nothing complete or coherent would come to her mind. She read the letter from her father again.
Dearest Ruthie. Our baby. Texas. I forsake my family for you
…Other words flew through her mind, too.

The words that she’d flung at her mother in hateful ways over the years. Divorce, Mama’s fault. Selfish. Baby. Yale. Ruthie Moore. What happened to Ruthie? Katherine was numb with the disparate thoughts, but amidst it all, she couldn’t stop remembering one thing. The argument with her mother in the dugout, the time she realized her mother was a liar, but wasn’t able to understand why. Images slammed through her mind. Katherine touched her face, the hollow under her cheekbone, where her mother had slapped her, the one and only time she’d ever done such a thing. Katherine had known something was wrong. Baby. Baby. The baby. Yale.

Katherine shot to her feet and tore down the steps into her mother’s room, where Yale peacefully read to Jeanie. Katherine crept into the room, staring at her sister, studying her black wavy hair, thin lips, and prairie blue eyes. Suddenly with the lucidity that should have been there for seventeen years, but went by the wayside with a stinging slap, Katherine admitted what she’d known to be true all along.

Chapter 22

1888
Dakota Territory

When Jeanie headed back to the house with Ruthie’s baby, her mind had sorted through every scenario under which plans for Ruthie’s baby could be made. She could have Templeton drive her to Yankton and drop the baby at the nearest orphanage—they would find a fine home for her. Jeanie would keep her promise to Ruthie for if she didn’t she feared her Yale would wander eternity alone. She couldn’t have that.

But Jeanie didn’t want an attachment to this baby. She wasn’t the right woman to raise her. So, even when she breastfed the baby and changed her diaper, she averted her gaze from the child’s, treating her as though she were an object—a fine, delicate one—rather than human. Or, she could confess to everyone how Ruthie had died at nearly the same time Yale had and that Jeanie would care for Ruthie’s baby. But, it all seemed wrong.

There’d have to be an explanation about Ruthie’s baby. Jeanie’s children would know the story, everyone would know and the humiliation would be too great. Jeanie had a moment when she thought about fear, about how she seemed to be ruled by it yet again, but she told herself there was a difference between doing what was right for one’s children and being scared of one’s own humiliation. It was the children’s lives she was concerned with now, not her own.

Jeanie had been washing up in the dugout after Ruthie’s burial when she got word from the Hunts that Katherine and Tommy were quarantined at the Zurchenko’s with the flu. They’d driven up above the dugout, wagon groaning with all the belongings they could fit as they were leaving the prairie, heading back to Vermont. They bid each other goodbye, offering platitudes that meant nothing to Jeanie and probably the same amount to the Hunts.

In the absence of everyone, Jeanie had the time and space to fall in love with Ruthie’s child. It was only a day before she’d slipped into calling the baby Yale. Two days passed when Jeanie actually felt as though her Yale and Ruthie’s Yale were actually the same soul, when she felt her own soul commune with her dead Yale who somehow meshed with Ruthie’s baby as one and the same.

Templeton stopped by to drop off mail from Yankton. He and Jeanie barely said a word, just their gaze holding one another, wordlessly agreeing they were both too lost without James to talk about him, but understanding full well their loss.

“I stopped by for two reasons. One, I have news regarding Ruthie Moore. Her aunt and uncle were expecting her in Canada. She never showed up and the train she was to take jumped the track. Casualties everywhere. They couldn’t say for sure who was who. But, she’s gone from her home and so is the train ticket her uncle sent.”

Jeanie covered her mouth. Her hand shook. She swallowed hard, pushing down the truth that was trying to force its way out. Jeanie couldn’t allow it out. She’d dealt with too much already. There would be no way to explain her actions.

Templeton shifted his feet. “I know how much you liked Ruthie, before all that happened. I knew you’d want to know.”

Jeanie nodded and looked at her feet.

“Second, I’d like to take you and the children berry picking in the next week or so. The bushes in the far corner of my homestead are full as though last year’s fire had served to revitalize them.”