Yonnondio: From the Thirties (4 page)

THREE

Three days they jolted through Wyoming and west Nebraska. The black cuts of the buttes
against the sky, the colors in them like striped fire, the great quiet desolation
of the mesa they passed, filled Mazie with some strange unhappiness, more like happiness
than anything she had ever known. Anna felt like a bride; riding along, she sang and
sang. Sometimes Jim whistled or sang with her in a depthless bass voice. And the wagon
made gay silvery sounds accompanying them, and the sun laid warm hands on their backs.

The fourth day they came to South Dakota—breaths caught in sharp wonder at the green
stretching for miles, at the small streamlets like open silver veins on the ground,
and here and there dots of cattle grazing, heads down. The air was pure and soft like
a baby’s skin. “Breathe,” Anna said, “breathe it in, kids.” “Listen, Momma, there’s
birds.” Birds, floating round shining
bubbles of song on the air, jackrabbits rising suddenly from one end of the road to
flee to the other.

And that day there was laughter. Nellie, refusing to trot, stopping stubbornly, haunches
apart, head lifted up. In vain Jim beat her. When he clambered down to lead her; she
galumphed away at a tremendous (for her) speed. Though Anna, frantic, tried to reach
to dragging reins, the children screamed and laughed. Crazy, the wagon tipped, this
side, that side. “Seesaw, Marjorie Daw,” Will began. And Nellie, with immense dignity,
stopped.

Five minutes later Jim came puffing up. A farmer stopped his plowing to lean over
the fence. “Ya oughta get a mule, I reckon. They’re not so stubborn.”

“She
is
a mule in disguise.” Jim climbed up again. But again she wouldn’t budge. Leisurely
she cropped the grass at her side.

“How about the old grass-on-the-end-of-a-stick gag?” the farmer asked. “That’ll start
her trottin.”

It did. Jim, with one foot on the step, felt the wagon jerk forward and barely swung
himself up in time. Nellie didn’t wait to go for the food that hung tantalizingly
beyond her nose. For two hours she ran, Jim precariously directing her with the reins
over corners. Mazie stood up, her hands on the wagon seat, screaming with delight.
The wind came over her
body with a great rush of freedom; freedom and joy tingled to her hair roots. Anna
swayed back and forth, clutching her hat and the baby, laughing too. Ridiculous Nellie
with her huge buttocks moving in frenzied rhythm, the wagon bumping along after, and
the wheels making their singy laughter. Laughter came from the skies, blowing something
that was more than coal dust out of their hearts.

The sky tinged leaden. Enormous shadows began to shift over the face of the prairie,
and above the whole sky came gray, with dull silver undersides to the clouds. Cold,
the wind whirled from the north. Nellie set her head stubbornly against it, plodding
along. Jim stopped to stretch the canopy over them, telling the children to scurry
into their coats.

The wind began running a long hand under the dust, stirring it into a dervish dance.
A steady moaning came from the grasses. Mazie leaned forward to catch the feel of
the wind on her face—something seemed clawing in her to be out running with it. Anna
for some reason was laughing.

A cold tongue licked their cheeks—snow. Jim shouted back, “Cover up with them blankets
and throw another up here, Mazie. You better go back with the kids, Anna,” and Mazie
crept forward. The sky was invisible now. When she lifted her face, the snow stung
like nails. Mistily she could see her father
—on his face a look of being intoxicated, his heavy brown hair blowing back, his blue
eyes glittering. The snow fell thicker. The wind whirled it like a dancing skirt.
Even following the road was difficult. The fences alone helped. And nowhere was there
a farmhouse. Mazie did not care—it was enough to stumble on like this forever through
a white whirling world. The wagon sank. Nellie pulled bravely but in vain. Jim got
out. The back wheels were sunk deep in what had been a spring pool of water, under
the snow.

“What’s the matter?” Anna’s shout came faintly.

“We’re stuck,” he yelled back—the futility of voices yelling loud but coming out like
babies’ piping voices obsessed him. With head down Jim pulled against the wind to
win to the front of the wagon again. Snow was blowing in from the open front. “It’ll
be a minute.”

Mazie awkwardly fought her way after her dad, watched him lay down in the snow, put
his shoulder under the wheel. His body tautened, the wheel jerked. Again he straightened
out tense, and the wheel lifted. Jim held the weight of the wagon on him, not knowing
what to do next. Slowly he wriggled his body to the right, then crept from under.
Mazie could hear his hoarse breathing pulsating with the wind. He was fumbling along
the roadside, edging
a rock on the ground under the other wheel. “Roll it under when I lift it up again,”
he commanded. Again, with terrible strength he lifted the wheel. To Mazie, her fingers
frozen, rolling the rock seemed to take forever. Trembling, she got it under.

In an hour they found a small town, crouched in a hollow. In a one-story “hotel” run
by an obese Swede and his lanky wife, they got shelter. She caressed the children,
made a crackling fire, rubbed their hands, put on hot water for footbaths, exchanged
recipes with Anna, talked of the marvelous farming country around Zell, where they
were going.

Mazie, shivering before the fire, her eyes closed, remembered the feel of the wind
and the culm left behind.

The morning was a dim smear of light. Jim, looking at the white country, shook his
head. No travelin today. The sun made a wan smile of the afternoon, and all night
the melting snow dripped, dripped. Morning came, and the road was clear but muddy.
Ben cried at leaving the gaunt lady.

Two days later, the weather shining again, they came to a rise. Looking down, they
could see for miles. Far east rolled the hills, the near ones flat brown, washed over
with delicate green, the far ones
repeating themselves over and over till they faded into blue hazes and dull mists—indistinct
blurs of lines against the spring sky.

Below lay the farms, uneven patches of brown and plowed black and transparent green,
and far stretched the river, dull yellow in the sun, glinting crystal, where the wind
stirred it. Tiny as a toy, a man was plowing a thin thread of black in the brown square
of field immediately below them.

Everyone’s eyes were shining with wonder and promise. “We’ll be living somewhere beyond
that,” Jim said, with a gesture of joy and freedom illimitable (goodbye, mole’s life,
goodbye, you’re far behind me now); Willie babbled childishly of the man, grown so
tiny, and the baby stretched his arms and crowed. One joy lay in their hearts like
a warmth—hope. “A new life,” Anna said, “in the spring.”

With dusk a softness crept over the land. They were down in the lowlands now. Low
curves cut into the sky. The earth glowed with reflected color, like light under green
water, and Anna and Jim began singing, “Down in the valley, valley so low, hang your
head over, feel the wind blow.”

Willie slumbered against Mazie’s shoulder. Ben drowsily had his head in her lap, staring
into the depthless transparent green above. Even the gay tinkle of the wheel came
subdued and the clop of Nellie’s
hoofs incredibly hushed and beautiful. “Roses love nightwinds, violets love dew, angels
in heaven, know I love you.” Their voices were slow curving rhythms, slow curving
sounds. Voices, rising and twining, beauty curving on rainbows of quiet sound, filled
their hearts heavy, welled happy tears to Mazie’s eyes.

Anna singing, “In the gloaming, oh my darling, when the lights are dim and low,” with
bright eyes folded and unfolded memories of past years—plans for the years to come.
School for the kids, Jim working near her, on the earth, lovely things to keep, brass
lamps, bright tablecloths, vines over the doors, and roses twining. A memory, unasked,
plunged into her mind—her grandmother bending in such a twilight over lit candles
chanting in an unknown tongue, white bread on the table over a shining white tablecloth
and red wine—she broke into the song to tell Jim of it …

They reached the farm at midnight. Anna had awakened Mazie so she could see. There
were flatter fields, low houses, some with towers her father softly pointed out as
silos. Sometimes Jim got out and fumbled with a match before a mailbox or signpost.
At last there came a low rambling place, with three trees dwarfing it and barn larger
than the house looming in the back. Above the stars glistened—and
two twin stars hung over the roof. “The place,” Jim said.

Mazie, sleepy, lay down immediately on the mattress stretched for her and, with Will
and Ben breathing quietly beside her, fell asleep at once. Jim spent another hour
getting the barn open, moving the one bed they had taken with them in and setting
it up. Then he and Anna too slept. And into their sleep wove a dream of beauty curving
on rainbows of quiet sound over a land that stretched into mist, in which one figure,
tiny as a toy, plowed a black thread in a square of brown.

FOUR

The farm. Oh Jim’s great voice rolling over the land. Oh Anna, moving rigidly from
house to barn so that the happiness with which she brims will not jar and spill over.
Oh Mazie, hurting herself with beauty. Oh Will, feeling the eggs and radishes gurgle
down his throat, tugging the woolly neck of the dog with reckless joy. Oh Ben, feeling
smiles around and security.

Well, what of Benson? stoop-shouldered neighbor and his “I tell you, you cant make
a go of it. Tenant farmin is the only thing worse than farmin your own. That way you
at least got a chance a good year, but tenant farmin, bad or good year, the bank swallows
everything up, and keeps you owin ’em. You’ll see.”

But land is here. Days falling freely into large rhythms of weather. Feet sinking
into plowed earth, the plow making a bright furrow. Corn coming swiftly up. Tender
green stalks with thin outer shoots, like
grass. Oh Momma come look! Oh Daddy come look! Oh Mazie come look! Drama of things
growing. You’re browning, children. The world is an oven, and you’re browning in it.
How good the weariness—in the tiredness, the body may dream. How good the table, with
the steam arising from the boiled potatoes and vegetables and the full-bellied pitcher
of milk.

Around the house, the earth is hoed up for truck. Mazie and Will do the weeding, help
feed the chickens, bring the cow from pasture, wring out the clothes. But strangely
there is time. Sometimes Mazie pads with bare feet across the waving corn to the road—to
watch the carriages and wagons bump by. When there are gay little girls sitting high
and proud in the buggies, ribbons in their hair blowing a long streamer in the wind,
shame and envy shudder over her, and she draws herself together to make herself nothing,
to lose herself in the faded gray dress on her body. Then the sun and wind rippling
over her skin, and the gold corn moving against the sky lull her into beauty again
with the slenderest arms of rhythm.

Sometimes the neighbors come. Benson, he of the stoop shoulders, as if for all his
six feet he were trying to get closer to the earth. Two furrows live on his brow and
a curious compassion in his eyes. A compassion that is weariness and despair. He will
start to talk of a new way of planting, of the good weather, and then cease suddenly,
the compassion gray where the
living was before. Missis Ellis, round and laughing, sure of touch, knowing the helplessness
of newborn animals, how to bring animals and women out of labor, her voice the timbre
of earth. She laughs, but a kernel of worry hides under the laughter. Her father is
old Caldwell, pioneer, who had come west from college and wealth and chosen to live
and build out of the wilderness.

Jim’s big barn was the accustomed place for the midsummer dance in mid-July. Two days
before, neighbor women came to prepare the floor, bring food, help with the cooking.
Anna sewed over her good dress, bought bright ribbons recklessly for Mazie and herself,
washed and starched the children’s clothes.

The laughter of summer was on the earth. Trees, rich and voluptuous, flowered by the
roadside, brimming fields of corn waved in the sun, roses were in bloom, and the days
were bright with the colored balls of song, birds tossed back and forth.

The night of the dance was luminous with moonlight. Winds rushed over the fields,
faded to small breezes, subsided into stillness, gathered again. Trees dipped and
curtsied, the corn rippling like a girl’s skirt. Very low, very misty, very tender,
the stars shone, and over all flowered the smell of growing things, of fecund earth,
overpowering.

Mazie, with the green ribbon glowing on her head,
felt like spring. To her, Anna, with her black eyes laughing, her black hair smooth
and shiny to purple, was the handsomest woman there. But everyone had a look of beauty
about them.

Withered and small, the fiddler seemed too frail for any sturdy music, but at his
side the guitar and harmonica player rose strong and capable. The caller stood in
the middle. The circle eights formed. Then the music rocked in the air. Some of the
dancers were young girls and boys, quick of step, their laughter rising like a froth,
quick colors, step on step, bubble on bubble. Most were middle-aged men, women, still
young, if not in body. They gave themselves easily to the dance, backs curved, skirts
flying round and round. Round and round in the intricate steps, and, at the end of
each circle eight, the men gave out a long cry that beat up the blood. Summer was
in their hearts, high summer.

Swiftly the summer days blended into one another. Heat throbbed like a great anvil,
and hot glassy air shimmered over the dusty-smelling corn. Or a burst of rain would
come, “in a great glistening mesh. Nights were vast and fragrant with wind and stars
and the wavering sound of far frogs. Weariness, like armor, over their bodies, Jim
and Anna would sit in the blue night; Anna, her head against the top step
of the porch, caressing the flowers in her lap as if they were about to vanish; Jim,
puffing a pipe, trying to empty his mind, keep it motionless on the
now
, not on the past or what might come. The breath of the moon, mist and silver, lay
on the fields; the flowers clustered in bright shadows in the darkness. After a long
while Anna would laugh, a strange mirthless laugh, and rise to go into the house.
Then Jim, too, would follow, knocking the ashes out of his pipe onto the vine, giving
a last broad look over the night and the earth. Sometimes seeing them sit so in the
night, a sharp unhappiness would pierce the golden haze in Mazie’s heart; but the
blur of days descending so swiftly would wash it out again.

Once, hungry, degraded, after a beating from Anna for some mischief, Mazie lay by
the roadside, bedded in the clover, belly down, feeling the earth push back against
her, feeling the patterns of clover smell twine into her nostrils till she was drugged
with the scent. The soft plodding of a buggy gathered into her consciousness.

She turned on her back. Above the stars clustered, low, bright, still-winged. As if
she had never seen them before. Her breath caught. The buggy was stopping, and an
old man got out. Old Man Caldwell.

“Lost?” he breathed softly in the soft night.

“No, just watchin the stars. I live in that house over there—Holbrook’s house. My
name’s Mazie Holbrook.”

He came over and lay down beside her, so quiet in the dimness he did not seem to be
there. He was looking up too, making it a trusting dark.

“Stars,” she began. “What are they now? Splinters offn the moon, I’ve heard it said.
But more likely they’re lamps in houses up there, or flowers growin in the night.
I’d like to smell the smell that would be comin offn those flowers.”

He raised up on his elbow, staring at her. Then said, “Stars are suns. Like our sun.
But so far away—so many miles no one can imagine—they look tiny.”

“You know them things? Then what is the sun, a fire?”

“Miles of fire, many times bigger than the earth. But more than fire.”

“Yes, a fire. Now I know I can see that the stars are fire, for they are dancin now
like a fire movin.”

He laughed. Then told her why the stars seemed dancing, how old stars were, how they
lived and died, and of a people living long ago, the Greeks, who had named these stars
and had found in their shapes images of what was on earth below. As his words misted
into the night and disappeared, she scarcely listened—only the aura over them, of
timelessness, of
vastness, of eternal things that had been before her and would be after her, remained
and entered into her with a great hurt and wanting.

Hot midsummer nights when the bedroom of sweating, tossing bodies was too much for
her, she would slip out into the fields and the sad hurt would gather into her again,
seeing an old old people lying in just such a field, tracing out names and images
in the heavens where splashes of enormous fire whirled, eternal and timeless, and
tangled comets hissed.

One day, coming in because the hot dust pricked her feet so, she saw him again, sitting
with Ben on his lap, watching Anna put up tomato preserve. He was saying, “Vultures
running it now. It doesn’t make any difference whether it’s Republican or Democrat;
the same hand pulls the strings.” She was going to ask him what he meant, but Anna
answered into the kettle of steaming tomatoes, “The bellwether leads the flock all
right, but who is it sees they go how he wants? The one that trains the bellwether.”

“Exactly … when I came out, a man had some chance. The only thing against him was
nature, locusts and drought and lake frost. You took your chance. That was all you
had to fight. But now that hardly matters. There’s mortgage, taxes, the newest kind
of machinery to buy so you do as good as the
other fellow, and the worry—will it get a price this year.”

Anna stopped stirring, straightened up, steam or sweat beaded on her intense face.
“In college, did you learn why all that is?”

“In college …” He choked off his words and his face went frozen. “My education began
after I got out of college.” Then seeing Mazie, “Hello, my stargazing companion …
Mrs. Holbrook, children have marvelous minds. I hate to see what life does to ’em.”

Fall came. A dribble of gaudy leaves over the roads. Sheets of taffeta-gold corn brimming
the fields. Days alive with the throb of the threshing machine and the low moo of
cows calling across the meadows. Under the full moon, the kids sang and played hide-go-seek
in the hay, or listened to hear the apple trees plop their fruit upon the ground.

School began. Mazie and Will went for the first time. The playground squirming with
kids was wonderful, but the teacher that waddled and held her head like a duck and
her wheezing horror—“Eight years old and can’t read yet, you’ll have to go in the
first grade with your brother Will”—was shame. Yet the lessons came easy—the crooked
white worms of words on the second-grade blackboard magically transforming into words
known and said, although they were still stumbling over the first-grade alphabet.
Finding the two could suddenly read, the teacher put them both up one grade, but the
primer already breathlessly raced through with only silly sentences as a reward, they
spent most of their time secretly listening to the upper grades recite geography and
history—far countries, strange peoples.

Anna’s face would glow. “What did you learn today?” And Mazie would try to tell her.
“See, Jim,” she would say, handing Mazie or Will a catalogue, hearing them stumble
through the words. “See? They’re reading. They’ll be something, these kids.”

For the first time, Mazie was acutely conscious of her scuffed shoes, rag-bag clothes,
quilt coat. Stripping corn, she kept the soft silk; buried in the hay, she would dream
of somehow weaving it into garments incredible. But the tassels withered, grew brown
and smelly, and she had to throw them away. Sometimes, when the sadness in her heart
became intolerable, she gathered Will and Ben and baby Jim about her and recited for
them a poem learned from Old Man Caldwell. Not in his chaffing tones, but in a deep
mysterious voice:

Here, her voice would ripen into tragedy:

Reciting it, the sadness would ebb; the autumn world became blue and gold again.

One autumn dusk, with the calling of birds making her restless and a great gilt sunset
clotting over the prairie, Mazie left the smoky kitchen and ran down the road. There
was something to escape from. The autumn air, sweet with mellow death. But more, something
in the kitchen; her father with anger riding on his brow, the shadow curtaining her
mother’s eyes. Momma’ll hit me for runnin way thout doin the dishes, she thought,
but a hunger and fear pushed her forward.

There was a great star glowing in the heart of the sunset, like a still candle in
a vast unmoving flame. She could feel its glow on her face. As it sank, she began
to run across the fields, to follow it; the corn stubble cut into her bare feet, but
she knew only the sky dimming, the great star pulling down over the horizon, into
the night, and something vanishing
with it. Then it was gone, only darkness left, standing very tall and black about
her.

With a bite of agony, she felt the slashes in her feet. Whimpering softly, a great
void swelling in her, she started to find the road. Up ahead a big quiet hulk loomed,
with a sultry light in one window. Caldwell’s house, she thought; that must be Caldwell’s
house.

Bess Ellis answered the door. “Why, Mazie! What’s brought you all the way up here?”

“I …” Her feet made a silent screaming. “I come to borry a book or a catalogue for
to read.”

Bess opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again. “Well, come in. Dad’s
pretty sick, I guess you know; but he’ll be glad to see you.”

Mazie walked into the light; stared incredulous. There was a gleaming sink and a great
white cabinet. Upon the table, on a white tablecloth, glowed a bowl of vegetables
bursting with snow cabbage and crimson tomatoes and hard round radishes. In the other
room she could see a white plaster head and a wall of books.

Blood dribbled from her feet onto the kitchen linoleum; guiltily she forbade herself
to notice. Bess was calling from the other room, “Come on into Dad’s room—he wants
to see you.” He lay in the bed, curiously withered. Unmoving, only his eyes alive.
Mazie took a step backward.

His fragile voice shattered about her. “Come by the bed, child.” His hand, only a
shadow of weight, embraced her shoulder. “I’m glad you came, Mazie. I think about
you. How is your mother?”