What Was Left, page 5
At school there weren’t the endless chores, the long silent days with only Rose’s quiet curses when she realised she’d burnt the biscuits. There were books and words and sharpened pencils and more kids than she’d ever seen before, all with combed hair and skinned knees and chatter that never stopped. There was the kindergarten teacher, Miss Everty, with her horn-rimmed glasses and pleated wool skirts, and a way of saying words that Judy mimicked under her breath. Joshua didn’t have to worry about Judy bothering him during recess because most days Judy stayed inside with Miss Everty, sharpening her pencils and washing the blackboard. Miss Everty would sigh and look out the window at the plains that surrounded them and her eyes lost the hardness that kept the whole classroom in awe of her ruler.
Judy was careful not to speak to her then, just as she knew not to speak to her mother when Rose took to the couch with a glass of the cooking sherry. Neither of them looked as if they wanted to be where they were in those moments. It was a look that haunted Judy for the rest of her life.
Judy’s parents, Rose and Ezra, weren’t born onto the farm, it was something they had chosen. Well, Ezra had chosen it.
They were both born in Chicago. Ezra grew up in the shadows of tall buildings and crowded streets and the filth that was part and parcel of cities in the twenties and thirties. Rose’s family lived in the wealthy enclave of Oak Park, where wide lawns and wraparound verandahs took the place of skyscrapers and slums. Ezra dreamt about land and open space from the moment he realised it existed—a train journey to visit some relatives when he was six. And when his father died of a tetanus infection when Ezra was twenty-two, the boy did two things: he asked the softly spoken girl he’d seen sketching paintings in the Chicago Art Institute Museum to marry him; and he spent his inheritance on forty acres and a farmhouse he’d never seen in a state he’d never even visited.
‘Nebraska is the place to be. More land than you can imagine,’ he told Rose as he strolled with her along the shores of Lake Michigan, watching the water lap the grey stones.
Many years later, Rose told Judy that she’d wanted nothing more than to cry. She’d already said yes, and not just to the engagement. Two months prior, when they’d both had too many gin sours at her sister’s birthday party, he’d hidden in the cupboard of her bedroom until her parents had fallen asleep. And now she couldn’t say no, though she’d always taken his chatter about green fields and fresh air as nothing more than daydreams. She had imagined he’d spend his inheritance on a small, respectable house a few blocks from where she grew up. She had already given him the thing about her self that was worth the most, and now she was trapped.
‘If you don’t love it,’ Ezra had said, turning to hold both her hands in his own, to look in her watery eyes, ‘I promise we’ll leave. We’ll sell up and come home. Just give it three years. That’s all I ask.’
Three years was all it took for Rose to have two babies and for Ezra to finally get his first crop to succeed—three years of hand-wrecking, sun-beaten work that left both of them so tired at night they could hardly mumble goodnight. And then every time she mentioned going back to Chicago there was a good excuse.
‘We’ve only just gotten on our feet, we’ve got to give it a little more time.’
‘Just while the kids are young, Rose, while they can enjoy all of this space instead of the pollution and filth of the city.’
‘If we sell now we’ll only get half our investment back, just give it a little more time. Please, Rose, it’ll pay off in the long run.’
Every year he had a new reason, and every year she retreated a little further from their shared world. She started sleeping in her sewing room. She stopped painting, stopped reading, stopped doing anything but washing, cleaning, gardening, cooking and feeding. There was no one for her to talk to. All the other women went to church on Sundays and got their gossiping done afterwards as the children ran wild and the husbands talked tractor.
The closest synagogue was 245 kilometres away in Omaha, and while the other women were never rude to her, Rose and Ezra’s religion made them more a spectacle than a part of the community. Jews don’t farm, surely. They count money and read books.
But there was Ezra, up to his shins in mud, helping one of the cows give birth rather than eating his supper. Or spending all Saturday cleaning the heads on his combine harvester.
Judy and Joshua could have been company for Rose. When they were babies she barely put them down—they each lived on her hip as if they were an extension of her—but as they grew so did Rose’s melancholy. Eventually it was only when they acted up that she gave them her attention: when they fought, or they didn’t finish their dinners, or they were sloppy with their chores. Then Rose would threaten them with a spanking from Ezra when he came in from the fields. And now this other baby was growing inside her, a baby that was too late for her love.
Rose lived for the letters from her family, who still lived in the same Oak Park house: stark white envelopes with pages of thick, expensive stationery, filled with the news. Joshua and Judy fought like tomcats to bring in the mail. He was naturally bigger but she wasn’t afraid to use her teeth. The letters didn’t come often—only three or four times a year—but whenever they did the child who delivered the letter got to see something so rare it was like a snowstorm in June: Rose’s smile.
Judy gave Joshua an Indian burn that he wouldn’t forget in order to get hold of the letter she remembers best, the one announcing the visit of Rose’s sister from Chicago. It was just after Jacob was born and Rose was back from hospital with Jacob, who never stopped crying.
Iris was older than Rose but never married. Ezra called her a spinster, but Rose wouldn’t hear a word against her favourite sister. She was tall and horse-faced but, Rose always told them, Iris made her own choice not to get married. She was a librarian and worked at the Chicago Public Library.
When she read the news, Rose hopped on one foot like the girl at Judy’s school who got stung by a bee during lunch. She clapped her hands and looked around the sitting room, where Judy had brought her the letter.
‘My sister will be here in two weeks,’ she said, her words bumping into one another. ‘There is so much to do!’
Rose went on a cleaning fit unlike anything her family had witnessed. Every piece of furniture was beaten, aired and patched. The pantry and kitchen were scrubbed, and Judy would come home from school to find Rose on her hands and knees beneath the kitchen table, trying to work an ancient stain out of the linoleum while Jacob cried in his crib, his wail reverberating through the spotless house.
Joshua would drop his schoolbag at the door and run off into the fields, but Judy always got harnessed into the domestic chores.
‘Is my aunt very clean?’ Judy asked one morning, wondering why her mother had woken her at dawn to polish the wedding silver. Iris was due the following day.
‘She’s just, well—she’s decent. Respectable. I come from a very respectable family,’ Rose replied.
‘Are we?’ Judy said.
‘Of course.’ Rose sighed and dipped her hand back into the jar. They wore white cotton gloves to protect them from the chemicals, but Judy would be smelling the chemicals on her fingers for days afterwards.
All she knew of Iris was that she sent brand new books for their birthdays, books with colour illustrations and pages that felt smoother than a puppy’s pink belly. Books so new that sometimes there were uncut pages, and Judy would slip downstairs to find the paring knife in the drawer beside the sink, hiding it in her skirt while she snuck back up to her room and leapt back into bed. Then the satisfying sound of a sharp knife against paper, slicing open a story. She devoured each book as if it were the only story on earth.
Iris chose books that were unconventional for children. She sent Joshua a copy of Moby Dick. Rather than those interminably boring first reader books, Judy got Black Beauty. Iris had been sending them books since before they were born, so that Ezra spent one icy February building each of his children a bookcase. Their books stayed in their rooms, within reach, rather than cluttering up the rest of the house. Judy imagined a kindred spirit in Iris, but her mother’s nervous energy infected her. The morning Iris arrived Judy hid in her room, in the wardrobe, worrying that somehow everything would go wrong and Iris would disappoint them.
Eventually, Iris came into Judy’s room on her own. She lay down on Judy’s bed, picked up the copy of Black Beauty from the shelf, and read aloud the inscription that she had written. She slipped her feet out of her grey heels, curling them beneath her. Peering from a crack in the wardrobe door, Judy thought that she had never seen a grown woman sit like that before, like a child. As tall and imposing as Iris was, in her black pencil skirt that was wrinkled from the journey, and an ill-fitting grey gabardine jacket, she most resembled an overgrown, under-groomed child. Iris began reading from Black Beauty and Judy slowly emerged from the wardrobe and sat at the foot of the bed.
The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it. Some shady trees leaned over it, and rushes and water-lilies grew at the deep end. Over the hedge on one side we looked into a plowed field, and on the other we looked over a gate at our master’s house, which stood by the roadside; at the top of the meadow was a grove of fir trees, and at the bottom a running brook overhung by a steep bank. While I was young I lived upon my mother’s milk, as I could not eat grass. In the daytime I ran by her side, and at night I lay down close by her. When it was hot we used to stand by the pond in the shade of the trees, and when it was cold we had a nice warm shed near the grove.
Iris’s feet dangled over the edge of the bed, and they smelled a little sour, like milk that had turned. Judy could see the seams in her stockings.
‘Come sit beside me. I won’t bite,’ Iris said, and she did. The book, her favourite, took on new life as Iris read it. She could just close her eyes and imagine the shiny black stallion, the way his legs rose in a trot, the sadness when he scarred his knees, the small cruelties of his life.
Iris shut the book and put her hand on top of Judy’s, the knuckles protruding from her long, delicate finger bones. ‘You are a smart girl, Rosie says. Doing well at school.’
Judy nodded. It was impossible to speak in front of this woman, who was everything a girl could hope for in an aunt.
‘Do you like the farm?’ Iris asked, looking out of the small window above Judy’s bookshelf to the yellowing fields, the muddy cattle pens, and the sky unbroken by clouds.
Judy shook her head. ‘I want to live in the city when I grow up,’ she said. ‘Buildings as tall as the clouds. Among libraries, pigeons, and people.’
‘What about now?’ Iris asked, but Judy shrugged. She didn’t understand. She wasn’t used to people asking what she wanted. Rose called, and they went downstairs to eat a supper of roast beef, with apple pie for dessert. Jacob was asleep, and Joshua kept kicking her in the shins. Normal suppers were much simpler, but there was nothing normal about Iris being in the house. Afterwards, the grown-ups sat in the parlour, which Rose had never seen anyone use, and drank small glasses of amber liquid from an ornate bottle that Iris brought from Chicago. They stayed up late, and Judy fell asleep to the sound of her mother’s ringing laugh.
Iris stayed a week and made the house, the entire farm, seem like a lighter place. Judy no longer dreaded the bus ride home in the afternoons, or the chores that waited for her while her mother banged pots in the kitchen or sat wordless on the couch, breastfeeding Jacob. Now there was Iris. Iris and Rose would look at an old album of photographs, laughing, or bake a cake, or just sit and talk on the verandah swing with the baby. Their sentences would be cut short when Judy walked up, but Iris would pat the seat beside her and she would sit and Iris would tell her stories about Rose, and about how much trouble they used to get into as little girls. Rose still got her headaches but Iris would tell her to lie down on the couch, place damp towels across her eyes and massage her palms.
‘There is a spot for headaches, right here,’ she told Judy, pointing to the excess of skin between Rose’s thumb and her index finger. ‘If you rub, it helps with the pain. It helps the headache disappear.’
Judy went back into the kitchen to finish peeling potatoes for dinner but stood by the door so that she could hear her aunt and mother talk.
‘And you’ve asked him, Rose? And he won’t leave?’
‘I’ve tried so many times. I’d just about given up until you came. And now I remember what it’s like to be happy. How miserable I’ve been. It’ll be worse when you go. With the baby, I can’t bear it. Don’t go, Iris.’
‘But, darling, I can’t stay. You know I have to get back. Will I speak to him? I’ll tell him how unhappy you are, how I could help if you moved back home.’
‘You can try, but it’s no use.’
The kitchen screen door banged and Judy jumped. She hurried to the bowl of potatoes by the sink and began scrubbing the loose dirt off them.
She closed her eyes and bowed her head, praying to God to please, please, please let her live in Chicago. ‘I’ll do anything to get out of here,’ she whispered, as much to herself as to the potatoes that she had helped harvest from the garden. They were sending out sprouts already, looking to take root. All it took was a dig of her thumbnail to flick the sprouts away.
A week later, when Judy remembered her wish she was flooded with guilt. Rose was fading in a sea of white in a hospital bed two towns away. Her father had collected Judy from school, his boots leaving muddy prints across the mopped floors.
‘Your mother’s had an accident,’ he said, his voice too loud in the empty hallway. Joshua was already in the truck, staring at the laces on his school shoes. ‘In the kitchen, chopping potatoes for supper. Knives too goddamn sharp. She’ll be okay. The doctors think she’ll be fine.’
Ezra drove them to the hospital three abreast in his pickup. None of them talked. At the hospital, Rose cried, her arms at her sides on top of the sheets, both wrists bandaged. Jacob was asleep in a crib in the hospital nursery. He was going to come home with them in a few days, Ezra said in the car, and a girl from the neighbouring farm would come and look after him.
‘I’m sorry,’ Rose told Ezra, as he stroked her hair. ‘I couldn’t stop it.’
Judy couldn’t understand. She was scared of knives for years afterwards, convinced that they had minds of their own. They would fly up and slice you when you least expected it. Rose looked so small and helpless in that contraption of a bed, but when Joshua and Ezra left the room she turned to Judy with unexpected cheer.
‘I think it’s best you go live with Iris in Chicago while I’m recuperating. They want to keep me here for a while. And Daddy can’t look after you and Joshua and little Jacob and do all the work on the farm. Your father suggested you stay and help look after Jacob, but it’s not fair. You’ll be happier in Chicago, with Iris, among all of her books. You always did take after her.’
Judy just nodded, wordless, wishing she could cling to her mother like a life raft but sensing she’d just suffocate her and weigh her fragile body down. She sat on the edge of the bed, watching the rise and fall of her mother’s chest, waiting for her father and Joshua to return, waiting to be sent away. She still wet the bed sometimes at night. She still longed to be read to.
Joshua and Ezra returned and the nurse wasn’t far behind them, with a paper cup of water and pills for Rose. ‘Visiting hours are over,’ she said. ‘Time for the bathroom and we’ll feed the baby.’
Judy kissed her mother and said goodbye. It was only walking out the door, last to leave, that she turned and saw the nurse pull back the sheets and unbuckle the straps that held her mother down.
Judy lived with Iris in Chicago for six months. She went to a local public school, read all of the books that she could get her hands on, and prayed every night that her mother would come and get her. The world had expanded exponentially and she wasn’t ready for it, even though she loved it there, and she loved Iris—their suppers of cheese on toast, evenings spent reading in the cosy apartment, the way Iris scrubbed her pale face in the morning and drew on her eyebrows with a black pencil, one eye half closed in the mirror beside the front door. But she couldn’t get the image of the straps out of her head.
January turned to February, skyscrapers tunnelled wind on the coldest days in the city, and Ezra finally came for her. He had sold the farm. Rose was out of hospital.
‘Pack your things,’ he said to Judy. ‘You’re coming home.’
‘Where’s that?’ she asked, as Iris stood behind her in the doorway, the warmth of her body making Judy feel somehow protected, somehow brave.
‘Lincoln Park,’ Ezra replied, ‘just a twenty minute cab ride, if the taxi’s still waiting.’
‘In a hotel? You could have stayed here,’ Iris said, shaking her head.
‘No, I’ve rented an apartment,’ Ezra said. ‘It’s temporary, but Rose is right. As much as I wish I was, I’m not cut out to be a farmer. Born here and I guess it’s where we’ll stay.’
He grabbed Judy with his calloused hands and gave her a rare hug, one which she quickly extracted herself from.
