“That's probably the worst of the wind,” he said, and no sooner had he spoken than the wind let up. At times like this her father was an Old Testament prophet in his deliberate manner and without a quake in his body or voice. He set the kerosene lantern in the middle of the kitchen table where his father and grandfather no doubt once put it. When he lit the wick and slipped the glass chimney over it, a fist of flame shot up. In his steady way he adjusted the wick until a soft light spread over the round table. He turned off the flashlight, and they all sat down around the yellow tablecloth of light. Aldah kept her face pressed against Alice's soft sweater as Alice smoothed her hair. Their mother stood motionless, a stark shadow in the kitchen doorway. Why, at moments like this, Alice wondered, did she look more like a grim messenger of disaster than like a warm motherly defense against it?
Rain hit like a fire hose against the house.
“Here it comes,” her mother rasped.
The crystal ball of her father's bald head glowed in the mellow light. Her mother moved across the kitchen and shoved a pie tin under the lantern with such sharp force that she looked like someone who thought she was saving the day. “Don't burn the table,” she said. “That's all we need.”
Alice felt tension in the room, but no panic. Aldah stared into the flame with her soft oval eyes. Their father's mouth was like a pencil mark across his face. Alice looked around the room and the steady warm light that the lamp cast on the praying-hands painting and the black-and-white Love Begins At Home plaque. Alice felt as if she was watching a
movie in slow motion, a portrait of her family forming and reforming before her eyes, and she couldn't decide if they were scared or relieved to be together like this.
“Will this wind break the cornstalks?” she asked. She didn't put any worry into her voice. She tried to behave as her father behaved at times of crisisâquietly gather the facts and, under all circumstances, stay rational.
“Maybe,” he said. The muscles around his mouth tightened.
“What did the weather report say?”
Before he answered, snapping sounds came from the asphalt in front of the garage.
“That.”
The first hailstones were large, popping and splattering like eggs, but they were followed by an encore of smaller hailstones. Buckets and buckets of hailstones.
“Horses,” said Aldah. Alice saw her satisfied smile.
The hailstones did sound as if they were galloping across the roofs.
“Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” said her mother dryly. Alice glanced at her and detected a smirk on her face, as if she were enjoying her own bitter cleverness.
The rest of the family kept their usual silence in response to one of her bizarre proclamations. The hooves of hail became a clatter of pebbles, first on the roof of the house and then amplified on the metal roofs of the cattle shed, the machine shed, the hog feeders, and the corn dryers. Pig squeals cut through the noise of the hail, but they were squeals of life as they fought to get inside out of the storm. A cloudburst of hail. Thirty seconds? Sixty seconds? It was like sitting in the dentist's chair waiting for the drill to stop. Alice clenched her fists. She clenched her jaw. Her mother slumped down into a chair at the table, and they all sat staring into the warm flame, listening.
Alice knew that through his grim expression her father was calculating. What was this hailstorm costing? A hundred dollars a second? A thousand?
Aldah sat between Alice and her mother, with her father across the table. They all stared into the yellow light. Her father could pray at times like this, but he didn't pray. He stared.
A half hour passed before the metal roofs were silent again. Her father stood up. “Well, that's that,” he said. “Let's go to bed.”
“Y2K,” said her mother. “How's that for starters?”
Her mother the conversation stopper.
Her father stood off to the side watching them. No one stirred. For several minutes the family was unanimous in their silence.
Alice could feel the image of that moment make its imprint on her mind: her dear sweet sister leaning into her sweater, the squat egg shape of her, her mouth open slightly with her tongue resting on her lower lip; the chiseled features of her mother, her hair like a helmet, her detached and inscrutable countenance behind the large glowing eyes; and her erect and controlled father, calm and cold as a bronze statue. Alice had no idea what she looked like or whether she resembled any of them in appearance or behavior. It was a vivid photograph of her family, with her as a blur.
When her mother stood up in a manner that was both deliberate and languid, Alice and Aldah rose too, all of them in the dim kerosene light with their shadows casting misshapen figures on the kitchen cabinets and wall. With the kerosene lamp light on her back, her mother followed her own weaving shadow into the living room. She was dressed in jeans and work shirt. She picked up a blanket from the couch and flung it over her shoulder as if she were ready to wander off and away from the whole scene.
All summer the tension had grown in her mother, an edginess that could erupt into sharp words or strange actions at almost any time. She acted as if she was expecting the worst, though Alice didn't know what “the worst” might mean for her mother. She probably didn't either. Sometimes Alice assumed that her mother was afraid of everything and anything the future might bring, whether that was an influx of immigrants or the inevitable change of farm life. The millennium was a magnet that drew all of her unspoken fears together. Now she moved across the living room and became a long silhouette in front of the picture window, then stood motionless again, staring out into the darkness. It was impossible for her to see the hail damage, but she must have known as well as the rest of them that it was there and that it had been devastating.
Aldah's bedroom was a small room, which before the remodeling had
been a large pantry off the kitchen. With her father holding the lantern, Alice led Aldah into her pantry-bedroom and tucked her into bed.
“Read to me.”
“No light,” said Alice. “I'll play something on the piano.”
“No light,” said Aldah.
Alice knew most of Beethoven's
Moonlight Sonata
by heart, but when she started playing it in the dark, Aldah yelled out, “Not that one! Not that one!”
Alice switched to “Have Thine Own Way, Lord” and played the simple hymn three times to the quiet approval of her sister, who was soon asleep. Alice found her way up to her own room, got in bed, and wondered if she should pray but found her mind was filled with cacophonous sounds of clattering hail and squealing hogs warring against country music and a church organ playing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” The Devil's work, she thought to herself, and closed her eyes.
8
Sleep did not come easily. The truth of what had happened to their farm came to her with the weight of the silence. Cool silence, but a silence that was heavy as the sultry silence before the storm. It was the kind of silence her great uncle told about when he spoke of the deathly calm that followed a German bombardment of Rotterdam. Nobody moved because that might have invited more destruction. The old Krayenbraak house had been their bomb shelter while their farmland was machine gunned to death. They had been strafed for an hour, and now the final aftermath was upon them: Silence. Numb silence. Posttraumatic silence.
What was the point of it all? What issue did the sky have with them? Hadn't they suffered enough? She felt battered and defeated like the fields outside. She was wrung out, flat, with neither an urge to pray nor to shake her fist at God and scream, “Why us?”
She thought of her parents and how everything had come to this moment. Her father had been his usual strong self through the storm. She could understand why her mother had fallen in love with him: he was handsome, he was gentle, and he was strong in a crisis. But what did he see in her? True, the pictures of her as a young woman made her look beautiful. She had that wry and sultry look and the hint of a smile, combined with an inscrutable expression coming from her eyes, what Alice had come to regard as an intense blankness. What did her father see? He must have seen somebody who needed rescuing, not from the world but from herself. What did he see in her now? Alice saw a woman who was so erratic in her moods and so unpredictable in her behavior that she'd hate to see what label a certified psychiatrist would give her. Maybe she was only a more sharpened version of the person she had always been. Maybe her father understood her and saw something good, though
other people saw what Alice saw: an icy presence who would complain about anything that didn't fit her fancy. Alice absorbed the looks on merchants' faces when her mother walked into a store, the look that said, “Oh no, get ready, here she comes.” Her mother was an embarrassment.
People probably talked about her whole family, not just her mother. No other family looked like them. Both of her parents looked older than most parents with teenage kids, and their height made them stand out even more: her mother was over six feet tall like Alice, and her father was a towering several inches above them. Unlike most of the farm folk, the three of them were skinny. Then there was Aldah, who was barely five feet tall and weighed twenty pounds more than Alice. Outward appearances were just a start. Aldah at fifteen had a vocabulary of sixty words, though she was progressing every dayâthanks to Alice, not her mother.
Alice was no doctor, but she was convinced that there was something very abnormal about her mother and the way she looked for the darkest possible side of every issue. The approach of the millennium only made things worse: some part of her seemed to relish the most gruesome predictions of what the millennium might bring. That was her mother.
Alice glanced at the clock. She needed sleep. She
had to
get to sleep. The steers would be as hungry in the morning as they were earlier that night. She breathed deeply and tried to relax, but an uninvited guest came into her mind as she was starting to doze. It was her mother from her shoulders up, looking at Alice with eyes that said, “I know you. I know you better than anyone knows you.” The face hovered against Alice's closed eyelids. The image of her, yes, perhaps this is what her father saw, a strange warmth. It was love. Alice couldn't fight the feeling. Her mother, bizarre as she was, loved her. She was like a guardian angel, and no one ever said guardian angels had to be nice.
Maybe she was just trying to forgive her mother so she could get some needed sleep, but the feeling was a comfort. As sleep moved toward her, new pictures came into her mind like a shuffling of photographs: pictures of farms, one after another. Dead farms. Dying farms. Farms that hid their sickness. Chronically ill farms that wheezed through the night with sad and drooping fences, with fence posts that looked like contorted spines, farms with thistles on the loose, cocklebur farms, farms with poorly installed culverts that spring floods spit up into the ditches
and fields, soil-depleted farms, farms with rutted driveways and flapping barn doors. And the modern transformed farms, megafarms, feedlot confinement farms, polluting farms, farms that stank to high heaven. Eye-watering-stench farms. Sickening smell, gagging farms. Farms whose odors had color and textures and taste, like dense green fog farms, sticky hot mauve farms. Curdling slime farms. The living-dead farms. Monster farms. With the images flooding her mind, so did the smells.
Fading farms, falling off the landscape one broken piece at a time, the old equipment rusting in the grove, the unterraced hillsides giving way to deeper gullies every year, the sway-backed sheds, the leaning mailbox. The slow death, two decades for shingles to wear out, another decade for barn ribs to show, then years of desertion before vandals smashed all the windows. Until the farm looked terminally ill, overburdened with chemicals, on its last breath, exhausted, one finger on the morphine button.
Like the Den Moolen farm two miles awayâfirst the storage sheds, then the chicken coop, then the hog house, then the cow barn, then the lawn and garden, then the seven-gabled white house with its white picket fence and the blood-red rose bushes. The U-shaped grove like a good-luck horseshoe lingering for yearsâthe ash, the box elder, the cottonwoods, the willows, the mulberry, the apple trees, all hanging on like faithful mourners at a wake, until the big Caterpillars shoved and tore and leveled and dug, a brutal preparation for mass burial. Then only the erasure mark where the farm had been, and finally only the long unbroken rows of beans and corn with their indifferent suggestion that nothing had changed, that things had always been this way and were meant to be this way. Rolling endless fields of beans and corn without the jarring images of barns and sack swings and houses and other nuisance reminders of human habitation. Land that imitated what the settlers saw in the endless ocean of prairie grass, waves of it extending toward the horizons. Miles and miles of uniformity. Fields of corn in full uniform, at attention, tasseling bayonets pointing up. All of the undone farms, like the Den Moolens', making what travelers looking at the Iowa landscape called boring boring boring.
“Dear God,” she finally prayed, “send a miracle.”
Instead of a miracle, more images swept through her mind: fields of sameness, corn of uniform height and color, bean fields of narrow uniform rows, corrugated metal cattle sheds, the uniform silver ridges,
the big round bales stacked in perfect rows, the feeder cattle like huge Walmart sales baskets filled with identical cattle figures with glassy plastic eyes, and milk cows all uniformly sized with uniform bland and white spots and with perfectly sized udders and teats, as if shaped for convenience for the cup size of the milking machine, and their uniform cow eyes, all blue-black, shining, perfectly round, rolling across the level screen of her mind. She counted the eyeball marbles as they rolled past, counted and counted until she fell asleep.