The Third Grace (23 page)

In spite of his assurances, Aglaia knew he must be swamped at Incognito, just waiting for her return.

“The harvesting should be done in a couple of days,” she said, ignoring the thunderclouds building in the west. “Then my friends will drive me home, so I'll be in to work on Thursday morning.” She was sorry now that she'd left her car in the city and had to wait for Byron to take her back.

“There's no rush. Your family is more important than your occupation. Take the whole week off—you've earned it.”

“I don't know if I can stay away for another whole week, but I'll need a day or two to catch up on my sleep after this harvest.”

“I want you rested,” Eb said. “I have news for you concerning that movie being shot in the area—I mentioned it to you a while ago.” He told her Incognito was in the process of placing a bid on a contract to provide costuming. “It's likely we'll win the competition, lass. No other shop in the city has our reputation or the weight Montreal is throwing behind us. I think headquarters wants to be connected to a box office hit.” He snorted. “I hadn't made a fuss about it to you earlier because I didn't want to get your hopes up or take you away from the museum assignment. Our winning this film job, on top of your performance in Paris, should lock in that promotion I promised you.”

Aglaia thanked him for watching her back, but her attention had been caught by Eb's talk of the movie project. She recalled that Lou, also, had mentioned movies on a couple of occasions during the trip, and she'd thought it odd at the time because the comments were out of context and the woman had paused as if to give her time to react. What were Lou's motives, and did Eb's movie have anything to do with Lou's offer of employment at PRU? The timing was fishy.

She felt justified in her new wariness of Lou who, after all, had told a bald-faced lie about François meeting her in the Louvre. Aglaia gritted her teeth just thinking about it again. Lou promoted herself and her own purposes at every turn, with no thought of the consequences for others. Eb, on the other hand, was concerned for her family, wellbeing, and personal success. How could Aglaia even think of leaving Incognito for a job under Lou? Guilt pricked her conscience.

She and Eb said goodbye and, since Aglaia had the phone anyway, she retrieved her messages left over the past week. There were a few from friends, and one from Tina calling from the hospital to ask about the crop yield because Henry was making a racket, wanting to know how many bushels to the acre they were getting. She also said that the doctor planned to send Henry over to Denver for some specialized tests unavailable in Sterling. Aglaia could hear the worry behind her mother's words but there was no time to return the call because Byron fired up the combine again.

Aglaia was bone tired by the time Byron shut down that first night, after the sun had set and the dew came on and the tough crop started plugging the combine. They stood together in the Klassen farmyard under the light of the great orange moon, Byron's face streaked with the day's labor.

“I'll be staying here at Mom and Dad's for the night,” she told him. “You go on back to your family and I'll be ready for you in the morning. I don't need my suitcase. There's got to be a spare toothbrush somewhere.”

Byron rubbed the blonde stubble on his chin. “Naomi must have a cake or something in the oven for us.”

“She's been feeding us all day. Besides, I'm beat,” Aglaia answered to excuse her lack of sociability. “I'll just fall into bed anyway.”

She found the door unlocked. Zephyr streaked over from the barn and mewled around her feet on the veranda. She picked him up to stroke his fur and pat his round belly; apparently he'd been eating well, too. He was a natural predator. Had he tangled with a rat yet? They used to lurk beneath the coop, dilapidated now with its roof caving in and the chickens long gone. Gathering eggs had been her first after-school chore, delegated at age six when she'd grown tall enough to reach the nesting boxes and Joel had graduated to milking.

“Let's line this wicker basket with a clean tea towel so the eggs won't break,” her mother says as she folds under the ends of the striped muslin cloth. “Now Mary Grace, be quiet with those
Heena
and don't excite them.”

So she pulls on her sweater and trots across the grass, crunchy underfoot with new frost, and steps down over the sunken sill of the door into the closeness, the smell of ammonia making her eyes water. Trying not to upset the roosting hens, she sneaks her hand under each downy breast so she doesn't get pecked and brings out brown speckled eggs, fragile and warm with the life still growing in them.

“Mary Grace!” It's Joel calling to her from the barn. “The mama cat's had her kittens, five of them. Come see!”

Aglaia put Zephyr back down and closed the house door behind her, leaving him outside in his natural element; she'd pour milk for him in the morning. She reached for the switch but stopped herself. She hated the fluorescent ceiling light as much for the buzz as for the moths it always attracted. The homey aroma that rose from a bucket of ripening tomatoes on the counter took her back to the garden, where she used to meet her father just after dawn to help him hoe before the mosquitoes started to bite, or to fill a battered tin basin with new potatoes, the loam making wrinkle patterns on her knuckles.

Aglaia groped through the kitchen and up the creaking wooden staircase of the house. The moonlight shone through the windows. She trailed her hand along the banister and her arm bumped the frame of the cross-stitch she'd made two decades ago in kids' club: “I am the light of the world.” Even before she was old enough for youth group, the family always went together to church midweek, her parents for prayer meeting and Joel to play floor hockey in the basement with the boys. The girls' group met in the choir loft around a long table set up for their crafts, and they memorized Scripture to earn badges. They started with all the “I am” and “Blessed are” verses, and tested each other to see who could rattle them off the fastest:
I am the good shepherd… Blessed are those who mourn … I am the bread of life… Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they will be filled.

Well, she'd left her shepherd behind years ago, and worked hard at not thinking about light or righteousness, and had been ignoring her pangs for something more than the creativity that fed and watered her memories of François—something like manna.

Now, in the darkened house, Aglaia continued upwards, gripping the smooth staircase railing with resolution against the invasion of memories, against her weariness that was allowing such thoughts to bleed into her mind again.

Aglaia's bed was made up with the floral sheets Tina ordered from the Sears catalogue for her sixteenth birthday. They hadn't had much wear. It was well over a year since she'd last slept here, and she hadn't been home during harvest since moving to Colorado.

Aglaia unfolded the quilt that Tina had pieced together with scraps from sewing projects. She fingered the worn binding and assessed its cotton content. Was that striped patch from the Sunday shirt Mom made Joel? She found another square from her Easter dress the year she first partook of the Lord's Supper.

She slipped between the covers and into sleep without another conscious thought but that the full moon glowed on her through the old elm's branches and that the forlorn wind called her, tapping on the glass. She dreamed about the first-ever costume she made in kids' club for the Easter play— a flowered tablecloth fashioned into a cloak and a batch of willow suckers cut from the banks of the coulee.

Mary Grace and the other children wait for the pianist to give them their cue but not patiently—rather, tittering and scuffling behind the door to the stage, jostling one another, the boys teasing the girls with leafy fronds. Then they burst forth in all their childish enthusiasm and spill down the platform steps into the church aisle to meet the make-believe donkey and its rider, spreading their garments and palm branches before him as they shout, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” And no one in the congregation rebukes them for their jubilant cries in the sanctuary because, if they dared, the creation itself would testify—the prairie wind, the endless sky, the very stones of the earth would surely take up the children's silenced chorus of praise.

Aglaia awoke momentarily in the tumult of a thunderstorm rattling the windows of the farmhouse, blazing neon bright and branding her vision with black tree branches against the burnished sky. How many childhood pot-bangers like this had sent her flying into her parents' bed in fright? She fell in and out of another distressing dream.

The echoing crescendos rage like a beast, howling and reverberating through the skies like Leviathan thrashing his tail from the Abyss. Mary Grace is thirteen now and hasn't cowered like this since she was a kid at the demonic fury of the wind's screams unleashed in wrath from their restraints.

“Mary Grace,” Dad reminds her when she's tucked between them in the fortress of their presence, “it is the Lord's voice speaking out of the whirlwind from His throne, the Bible says. He's robed in majesty and armed with strength. The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.”

They spy a twister backlit by flashes forming in the roiling clouds, and Joel, who's slept through the onset of the din, joins them on the porch as they watch in awe a funnel dipping and lifting, a dark finger stirring the blacker fields before closing up into the fist of the sky. Then Mom mixes up cocoa in the aluminum pan on the stove and they dunk ammonia cookies like Grandma used to bake.

Tonight there was no tornado, no cocoa prepared by a motherly hand, no Bible-quoting daddy to calm a frightened, storm-tossed girl. And now she was no longer dreaming but half-sleepwalking, barely aware of the chill in the soles of her feet. She didn't have the ability to stop her movement over the basement floor towards the trunk of cast-off clothes beneath the stairs, the will to resist bending her knees onto the cement as she gathered up a sweater and pressed her nose into it and smelled it for François—or was it for Joel? And the mildew, or maybe the grief, made her eyes water, so she rubbed them with that raw wool, but still she was torpid, peering more deeply into the recesses of the cellar, seeking but not finding.

Her delirium and the incessant hounding of the still, small voice followed her as she padded back up the steps, and up the steps, head raised now to the bedroom window and the elm branches full of the bright harvest moon. And even then, in her sad state of half-awake sleep, verses from the Bible invoked her:
You who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy!… Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.
The next thing she knew, it was Monday morning and Byron was honking outside and she had a sweater of Dad's balled up in her fists, using it for a pillow.

H
arvest was completed on Tuesday night, the mania over. Aglaia awoke in the dark at four-thirty on Wednesday morning, her internal clock still topsy-turvy from the disruption of travel and the pace set by Byron, Sebastian, and Silas as they pushed to finish off the work. She swung her legs out from between the floral bedsheets of her maidenhood, her whole body stiff and sore, then propped her elbows on her knees and bent her head to her palms till the fog lifted.

Aglaia reached for the drinking glass by her bedside but it was empty, so she took it downstairs to the kitchen and turned on the tap. Well water, full of iron and tinted yellow, had a flavor Dad relished. Since her childhood he'd refused to put in a softener despite Tina's entreaties. Aglaia never wore true white until she moved to the city and found out how sudsy water could be. But she craved the taste and gulped down two glasses, letting the frigid overflow dribble onto her top.

Aglaia was wide awake for the first time in three days. The Enns family would still be asleep, no breakfast cooking at their place down the road, but she was famished now. Mom's refrigerator held a bowl of eggs and a sealer of sweet cream, so Aglaia mixed up an
omelette mousseline
and brewed coffee for dunking her toasted
Zwieback
—a truly multicultural breakfast. She sat at the table in Dad's chair and contemplated the nightscape out of the window as she ate.

The tempest had passed while she slept, the thunder cell moving westward and leaving a puddle shimmering on the grass outside like a shard of mirror blinking back up at the sky. Dawn wouldn't break for a while yet. She might as well resign herself to getting dressed, but somehow she dreaded the day ahead. Her thought life had been so occupied with physical labor that the free time might be hard to take, with the whole day to kill. The plan was for Byron to drive her to the city tomorrow morning, stopping along the way to pick up her parents at the hospital in Sterling to save them the cost of an ambulance ride to Henry's appointment with the specialist in Denver.

Aglaia's suitcase lay unzipped on the floor near the table. She'd brought it from Naomi's Monday after supper and hadn't bothered to take it upstairs to the bedroom, just digging through it for her shampoo and clean underwear as needed. The Bible had slipped out sometime during the night and sprawled open, face down on the linoleum. She prodded it with her toe.

It was abhorrent to her, an indictment of her failure on so many levels. Yet she couldn't despise it—either the particular volume heaped at her feet or the timeless composition of the Bible itself that was more than leather and paper and ink. It held too much meaning that went beyond her attempts to either deliver this copy to François or decipher his memoirs. Be honest, she told herself: They were her memoirs as well, and not restricted to that summer fifteen years ago. Her life had been written between the lines of that book long before François ever inserted his thoughts into the margins.

Aglaia withstood the urge to pick it up; it had served its purposes and she was done with it. But the Bible wasn't so easily dismissed. Her subconscious was soaked in the words of the text, and they taunted her now while she sat at the table with the starlight twinkling through the lace of the window curtain, bright specks of creation reminding her of heaven. She might try to ignore the Bible, but a far-off roll of thunder still boomed out praises to all who would listen.
Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters,
her memory echoed.
As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish… so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

The words antagonized her. She stood up and kicked that book once, and then again and again with rising fury, panting with the exertion, its pages tearing between her toes, until the Bible rested crumpled near the hot air vent by the cupboard and torn bits with lay scattered around. She turned her back on the mess.

She put on Tina's rubber boots encrusted with last week's mud and trudged away from the house and the ravaged Bible into the candy-floss sunrise, all pink and blue, and kept her head down to shun the celestial splendor. She must stretch her legs and air out her mind but, though it wasn't even seven o'clock, she wouldn't risk walking the road in the direction of Naomi's home in case she was spotted and called in for coffee.

She'd seen enough of Naomi these past few days, though never alone—a silent but mutual decision. So far Aglaia had withheld the fact of having met François in Paris and she didn't want to be quizzed about it. But Naomi was deflecting something, too, for all her culinary hospitality. At first, Aglaia chalked up Naomi's preoccupation to the taxing harvest tasks rather than out-and-out avoidance. But since Aglaia's arrival, Naomi never entered a room without a child on her hip or a teen within earshot, almost as if she were as wary in sidestepping some subject as Aglaia was in resisting reference to her romance in Paris. For just a while longer Aglaia wanted to hug the secret of François to herself till she grew tired of fondling it and was ready to admit its cheapness. Two sides of her character contended within her, one beatifying her passion for François and the other denouncing her gullibility.

Aglaia was dubious that he'd write—he hadn't yet, when she'd logged in to her account on the Enns computer yesterday afternoon. She considered sending off a quick message to him but had only his commercial address from the tavern and didn't know who else might access it. Anyway, if something were to come of the interaction in Paris, she wanted François to be the one to make the next move, to woo her as he'd done that summer. But she was no shy teen after all and, to be honest, she wasn't serious about going back to him in France. The exotic setting made her too vulnerable. Her stomach leapt again at the thought of his kiss in the doorway of his room before she ran off to catch the subway to the airport. But her heart's desire was to stay in her dream as long as possible.

Aglaia filled her lungs with the fresh morning air. The farmyard never changed except for the trees—the maples and elders and the windbreak of lilac bushes twice her height. Less than a foot tall at planting twenty years ago, the four hundred seedling bushes had required hours of hoeing by Aglaia and Joel. Weeds still thrive during drought, she thought. Ah, how they fought that prairie drought! Every week throughout the growing season, Dad hooked the tank up to the tractor and crept along the periphery of the yard, water draining from the half-opened valve in the back for the kids to catch in their one-gallon plastic ice cream pails and fling at the thirsty roots. They'd fill and empty, fill and empty, jogging to keep up, sweating and cheerful because Mom always poured them fruit punch as a reward and, more, because they splashed one another every couple of bucketsful. Who needed air conditioning when you had a brother with good aim?

She passed the sandbox overgrown now with quackgrass, and the bunkhouse her grandfather constructed for his hired hands before her father was even born, and the old smokehouse where her great-grandmother hung up the
Worscht
to cure. A flock of partridges took her by surprise, rising from the grass with a noisy flutter and a flash of white bellies. She passed the machine shop where she and Joel watched their father weld or work his circular saw while they squatted on the oily concrete, discussing together how the corroded blacksmith tools might have worked in the olden days—the bellows, the tongs—imaging they could hear the ring of the hammer on steel glowing orange from the forge.

And the barn! If anything defined this farmyard, Aglaia thought as she stepped onto the cement pad at its entrance, it was the weathered, red-and-white barn with the cedar shingles, the sliding door that always stuck. Did it still? She butted her shoulder up against the door's edge and leaned into it until it gave way with a grating squeal and moved, bit by bit, to expose the cavernous interior with its cobwebs and rough-hewn beams and hay-strewn floor. Joel's tack was still there in its place, the scruffy blanket she crocheted for his birthday still hanging askew over the saddle. The milking stool lay broken nearby.

She counts seven days since the funeral—that's 168 hours or 10,080 minutes or 604,800 seconds. Today the charitable neighbors finally let the family resume daily tasks, no longer leaving pots of sweet
Plümemooss
or casseroles of smoked sausage in batter bread, and now she's taking over Joel's chores.

Dad brings the Holstein in through the back door of the barn for Aglaia—she's calling herself by her new name now, even if Dad and Mom won't. Belle's hoofs clop and her full bag swings beneath her as she plods to the chop in the manger. Aglaia removes the stool from its peg on the wall and positions the stainless steel bucket. She presses her forehead against Belle's coarse flank and grasps the teats distending from the bag heavy with milk. As Joel taught her, she curls her fingers from the top down—left, right, left, right—and beats out the zinging tempo of the milk as it froths upward and changes tone. Joel always emptied the udder in much less than the forty minutes she spends, even counting the time he took to shoot a stream, now and again, into the mouth of a waiting cat. Joel never let the cow's flicking tail get on his nerves. Joel wouldn't have cried, either, she thinks when Belle kicks the pail over and the milk runs out onto the planks of the stall.

Aglaia moved away from the barn and the haunting thoughts of that summer. She stepped through the gate and lined her vision up with the barbed wire fence stretching northward. A couple of miles ahead, a massive, lone boulder jutted above the horizon. It was the fragment of a mountain deposited at the end of the last ice age, the glacial remains like a giant's skull signaling the beginning of the dunes—the Nebraska Sand Hills—themselves vestiges of the vast inland sea that was now dried and gone.

The Klassen farm bordered the southwestern-most tongue of the hills, down in the corner of the state where Tiege's founding Mennonites had tenaciously preserved their seclusion.

With her eye on the boulder, she began to run in her mother's unwieldy boots—to run like a flustered goose, flailing, her neck stuck out as she strained away from the ghosts of the yard. If she'd been pursuing memories of François, she hadn't found him here on the farmyard. He was confined to the margins of that bruised Bible lying on the kitchen floor.

By the time she was winded, she reached the grove of chokecherry bushes marking the boundary of the field.

Mary Grace is ten, and the sand flies are driving her crazy, but Joel just encourages her to keep on picking. Mom's promised to simmer up a jug of syrup for their supper pancakes.

It's good they had their first frost last night, he says, because it brings out the sweetness of the berries. As if she doesn't know that. As if he has to tell her again how the settlers bootlegged wine from the fruit, how the nomadic Plains Cree pounded them into their bison pemmican to keep them nourished on their wanderings. But his stories distract her and the picking is done before she realizes the flies have quit biting.

The field had lain fallow this past season, and it was brown and dead looking. The harvest she'd been trying to forget took place late that year as well, and the last time she was in this field the air was heavy with the dusty-mellow perfume of freshly cut wheat. She didn't want to be here. She hadn't meant to come here today, had she?

This sacred field was where she'd read her Bible on spring mornings in her early teens, sitting on the periphery atop the pile of stones she and Joel had picked over many seasons to earn spending money. And this profaned field was where she and François parked the truck on his very last night, right here in the presence of that altar of stones where she'd spent so many hours in prayer. And this field of reclamation was where Joel declared her untouchable and put the run on François, removing him from her young life with the threat of further violence.

Aglaia's heart was pounding, but now not from the physical exertion of her run. She forced herself to face the field against her revulsion, and turned towards it with intensity, almost expecting to see the blood. Not François's blood from the fistfight. He didn't figure at all in her final memory of this field—the most appalling memory—because he was already gone by then.

Her dreams for years had been leading her to this very spot, and she'd been running the other way for too long. She steeled herself and took a step into the brown field, the ground denting underfoot. It had taken place near the center—she recognized the dip, where the saline soil was white.

It's the morning after her night of shameless lust, just a few hours since Mary Grace discovered François to be gone, and she's drying the dishes as her mom takes a coffeecake, fragrant with cinnamon, out of the oven.

“You're very quiet, dear,” Mom says. “I suppose it has something to do with the French
Jung
leaving?” Mary Grace almost drops a bowl as her temper and the temperature of her skin both flare. Did Joel blabber to Mom, too, about the compromising position he found her in last night? It's bad enough that Dad knows.

But Mom can't know, after all; she continues talking brightly. “Well, take your mind off your troubles and run this cake out to the field for Joel. He must be hungry.”

Dad's gone to the village for repairs while her brother finishes up swathing the canola crop. He didn't touch the biscuits when the family sat down at daybreak four hours ago, instead getting up to fill a thermos with coffee and snagging a banana from the bowl as he headed out the door.

But she isn't sorry for him at all. She isn't sorry about his bloodshot eyes; she didn't sleep well, either. If he'd just kept his nose out of her business last night, François would still be helping him with the day's work.