Chapter One

Endings

It snowed so much the winter of '59 that even the rabbits were going hungry. Late afternoons, Dad and I, layered in itchy wool, climbed the snowdrifts to the weathered barn. Inside, the horses knickered softly, eager for grain. I watched the dust seep down above from the hayloft as Dad trailed an alfalfa bale across the floor. Opening a rusty metal chest, I measured out coffee cans of corn, soybeans, and oats, cramming a dusty fistful in my mouth after making certain that Dad wasn't looking. The horses pawed the ground, rattled their halters, and flattened their ears at each other as I poured the grain into their buckets. Across the barn, Dad sat beside the cow, his eyes closed, his head resting on her bony flank, and I could hear the splink, splink of milk as it steamed into the pail.

That November after my mother died, my father could not bear to stay in the house, so we moved in with Ruth, Dad's sister who lived in Minden. Since our animals remained on the farm south of town, we made daily four-and-a-half-mile trips to do the chores.

"Let's feed the cats," Dad said.

The cold, too-white of winter gusted in as Dad pulled the heavy door open and then pushed it shut, the metal rollers protesting as they were forced along the rusty track. I stood, snow-blind, waiting for Dad to load the .22. He walked ahead of me east to the pasture, his eyes squinting, the rifle, pointing down, cradled in the crook of his right arm. I followed behind him, trying to step in his tracks, so far apart and deeper than my years.

The rabbits had no chance. Dad's sights were straight, his trigger quick, and the blaze of snow offered them no place to run. They sat like stumps and fell before they heard the shot. The retort echoed off a wall of silence. We left them twitching and went on. Three times the snow was splattered with hot blood.

"That's three less rabbits to eat your mother's trees," he said.

Then, he paused, perhaps remembering their spring ritual of planting seedlings around the farmstead to break the wind and the monotony of the flat Nebraska plains, picturing her in her chckered blue housedress, leaning to the right with her left arm jutting out to balance the weight, as she carried bucket after bucket of water to nourish the tender twigs.

The snow had melted a little where the rabbits had died. Dad picked them up and carried them, dangling from his left hand, back to the barn. Speckles of blood followed us in the snow. As he skinned them, only the cats crowded around to watch, clawing at the fresh meat.

The chores complete, we closed the wire gate and sank, knee-deep in snow, back to the house. All winter, we sorted through rooms and closets daily, taking clothes, books, pots, lamps, and furniture we wanted to keep back to town and packing the rest into boxes for the farm auction scheduled in March. Load by load, my life was changing forever.

The house was cold, with the thermostat set just warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing. We worked quickly and silently. With each trip, the house became less our home, simply an empty shell. By spring, the furniture for the sale stood clustered in the living room like refugees, and boxes blocked the light from the bay window in the dining room.

Upstairs, all that was left of my bedroom was the iron bed that Mom and I had painted coral. For my twelfth birthday that March, I had persuaded her to let me have a room of my own, the west storage room with its bright double windows.

After school, while waiting for Mom to finish filling prescriptions, instead of sitting on the steps to the basement of the drug store reading comic books, I haunted Etzelmiller's Paint Store four doors down, paging through all of his wallpaper sample books. I showed Mom the wallpaper that I liked, an old-fashioned pattern of coral rose clusters.

"That's beautiful, honey," she smiled. "You have such grown-up taste." She put her arm around my shoulder and pulled me closer to her, my cheek pressing against the side of her soft breast.

I felt like the Fourth of July.

We chose some coral enamel paint for the old iron bed that had been rusting in the attic, and then we went to Hested's, the dime store on the northwest corner of the downtown square. There, at the back of the store, we found coral, ruffled, sheer curtains for the windows. It was a rite of passage into womanhood.

"They won't keep out much of the summer sun," Dad frowned when he saw them.

We used a whole box of steel wool pads to smooth the rusty headboard, but soon the bed stood in its coral glory at the south end of the room. Mom's friend and neighbor, Wilma, helped with the wallpaper, Dad put up the curtain rods and moved in an old chest of drawers, and I was emancipated. It didn't matter that I had to share the closet in my little sister's room. I was Almost Thirteen. With a room of my own.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I lay down in my bulky winter clothes on the bed in the now empty room and the wallpaper reminded me of the night Mom died. She had gone to bed with a headache, but that was not unusual. For over a year she had been seeing doctors about her severe headaches, but they told her that she was working too hard at the drug store, that she was too involved with community activities, and that she should just stay home with her family. Take it easy.

Her cries had awakened me in the middle of the night.

"Tom, it hurts so bad. Call the doctor."

I heard my father descend the steps, pick up the phone, and give the operator the doctor's number. Silence, a few mumbled words, and then the phone clambered back into its cradle.

"Tom, help me. Tommy."

Dad rushed upstairs three at a time until he was by her side. More words. More moaning. A wail sounding like nothing I had ever heard.

"Please, God, take her to heaven," I begged.

I began counting the roses in the moonlight, cluster by cluster, row by row, starting at the ceiling and working down to where the cries stopped, and Dad closed my door.

I don't remember much after that, except mother's body, covered by a white sheet, being rolled out the front door, the one we never used. And then she was gone.

Neighbors and relatives came and went all day, conglomerating in the kitchen, the counters and table jammed with tuna casseroles, Jello, bologna and cheese sandwiches, deviled eggs, cookies, and chocolate cake. I was told that I wouldn't come out from behind the kitchen door. Perhaps that's true, because I remember voices on top of voices.

"She was so young."

"Only forty-six."

"The doctor told her that she was doing too much."

"Are they going to perform an autopsy?"

"They say Tom wouldn't let them cut her open."

"What a shame. They ought to find out."

"They say the girls will live with Jean's folks now."

"How can Tom take care of them, commuting the way he does to the print shop in Kearney?"

"They say he leaves before dark and doesn't come home until after dark."

"What about his sister, Ruth?"

"Their folks are both gone now, but I doubt she'll ever marry."

"She took care of them until they died."

"But two little girls?"

"She's almost fifty, isn't she?"

"What a shame."

Somehow I must have slipped outside because I do remember sitting in the hayloft of the barn. I climbed to the very top of the scratchy bales of alfalfa. My breath puffed out in clouds, and it was very quiet. All I could hear was the opening and closing of car doors, the opening and closing of the screen door. Then silence. Silence.

Her death was all my fault. Her cries were so awful, I couldn't think right, so I had prayed to God to take her to Heaven. And then she died. I should have asked him to make her well. Why didn't I do that? And then last week when she came to school and joked around with all of my friends, I was so embarrassed of her. She was wearing bright red lipstick, and her rhinestone bracelets clanked on her wrists. Everybody looked at her.

"Who's that?"

"Susanne's mother."

I had wished she wasn't my Mom. Now I didn't have any mother. And it was all my fault. It was all my fault.

After a while, I heard someone enter the barn and begin climbing to the loft--scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape--up the two-by-fours nailed to the studs on the side of the barn wall.

"Hi."

Terry, my thirteen-year-old neighbor from across the section, Wilma and Bert's son, stood by the edge of the loft where we threw the bales down to the horses. Our parents were best friends, and we had grown up together, survived childhood, so to speak. His canvas coat was buttoned up to his neck and his cold-reddened hands stuck out of too-short sleeves.

"Hi," I answered.

"Whatcha doin'?"

"Nothin'."

He sat down beside me, and we chewed on stems of alfalfa. Sparrows and starlings, disturbed by the activity, fluttered about, changing places on the rope strung across the top of the haymow. Every fall, Dad would park the hayrack below the high haymow door, and we would use the rope to pull up the bales of sweet-smelling hay into the loft.

"Where are the cats?"

"Herekittykittykittykitty," I called.

A yellow cat appeared from in between some bales, and climbed, purring, onto my lap. A gray tomcat, who had climbed up the board ladder, peeked his whiskers up over the haymow floor, deciding whether or not it was worth it to walk on the beam over to the solid floor.

Terry slowly untied the rope, as big around as his wrist, that lead to the big block and tackle by the haymow door. He gave it a strong, quick jerk. Dust poufed from the sisal rope, and birds flew everywhere, some escaping through the hole at the peak of the roof. Two sparrows lay motionless on the hay. The tomcat growled, grabbed one of the stunned birds, and dragged it off to kill it. A striped cat appeared from nowhere and began fighting with the yellow one over the remaining sparrow.

"Let's get another one for Tiger," Terry said.

"I want to do it."

"Here." He handed me the rope.

"Wait until they settle down. Then jerk it really hard."

I waited, my heart beating so fast I could feel it in my ears. I gripped the rope and pulled. Thunk.

Tears began washing down my face. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The day of the farm sale arrived too quickly. Everything happened too quickly. Dad and Ruth had purchased an acreage a couple of miles southwest of Kearney and had contracted to have a house built. Ruth had been hired to teach fifth grade at Emerson Elementary, and we were moving to Kearney as soon as school was out in the spring. We didn't need two complete households or much of the farm equipment.

All morning the neighbors had been going in and out of the house, helping Dad carry the boxes of household goods into the farmyard. The screen door creaked and slammed, creaked and slammed, creaked and slammed. Long tables, borrowed from the church, had been arranged in rows from east to west and consumed the space all of the way from the chicken house to the milk shed.

Out in the lot behind the old horse barn, the farm machinery waited beside the loops of rusted barbed wire, stacks of hedge posts, and crates of tools. The pitchforks, scoop shovels, and spades, their handles polished from years of labor and linseed oil my father had religiously applied to keep them from splintering, leaned against the hay wagon like hired hands taking a noon break. Buckets of cow kickers, the old block and tackle from the haymow, wrenches, screwdrivers, hay hooks, and rows of faded red Butternut coffee cans brimming with assorted nuts, bolts, screws, and nails crowded the top of the wagon. I wandered among the clutter, surprised that so much had been found to sell at the auction.

I climbed up onto the metal seat of an old sickle mower that had been rusting in the weeds behind the granary for as long as I could remember and pretended that I held the lines to a team of horses, and we were cutting alfalfa on the north forty. "Gittup, Blaze! Gittup, Beauty," I clucked. "Gee, now. Haa! Whoa, easy girls, whoa now," and tried to remember whether "gee" meant right or left.

Whack. I felt a thump on my back as a clod of dirt exploded into dusty pieces around me. "Terry!" I yelled without turning around. I jumped off the mower in time to see him loping around the corner of the barn, his long, gangly legs carrying him out of range and sight. Rounding the corner in pursuit, I stopped short, for the yard had begun filling with strangers who were milling about the now-laden tables, thumbing through cookbooks, turning over plates to determine their value, and holding my mother's aprons and dresses against their clumsy bodies to assess the fit.

Beside my parents' dresser, chest of drawers, and mahogany bed tilted my iron headboard, the coral lace curtains draped unevenly from the top rail. I didn't even close the gate as I raced to the house, weaving in and out of the farmers and their wives until I reached the kitchen. Aunt Ruth was sweeping up the dust where the stove and refrigerator had stood, and a circle of friends was consoling Grandma. "Where's Dad?" I asked, but nobody seemed to hear.

I sprinted upstairs to my room and found it empty, except for the coral roses on the wallpaper. I heard a shuffle of steps behind me, turned, and saw my father. "My bed," I cried. "Why are we selling my bed?"

"Honey," he started.

"Tom, what do I do with these arrowheads," a voice from below said. Dad and I looked at one another other, both of us remembering our days of hunting them each spring when the frost heaved them to the surface of the fallow wheat fields. The hill east of the home place was a traditional stopover for the Sioux Indians on their return trip from the Flint Hills of Kansas. Every spring, the Indians would rest their horses on our hill and begin shaping the new stone into tools and weapons. And every spring, a hundred years later, we would walk the fields, searching for the butterscotch-colored points.

"I'll take them," my dad replied. We walked together downstairs, and he handed them to me. "Put them in the basement, honey. We don't want to sell these, do we?"

The auctioneer arrived at ten to sell my childhood to the highest bidder. I stood, alone, beneath the old cottonwood tree where Dad had built a hitching rail for our horses. Cars and pickup trucks lined the driveway and both sides of Highway 10 in front of the house for a good quarter mile both ways. Men in stiff new overalls and women in starched aprons trampled around the yard, and children raced up and down the aisles of tables, playing with my outgrown dolls and picture books. Even though I was twelve years old, I felt an urge to object, "That's mine. Don't touch it," but I knew I couldn't. I didn't like dumb old dolls, anyway.

The auctioneer stood at the south end of the yard. I was too small to see him, but I was tall enough to hear the bid. "WhaddamIgive for this fine set of dishes. Twennytwennnytwentytwenny, do I hear twenny dollar?"

I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I turned to see Terry. A smile stretched between his sunburned ears, and his blue eyes said, "Follow me."

Silently, we stole out to the old cow barn in the far northeast corner of the farmstead. We were not allowed to play in that old barn, for it hadn't been used in years. Ancient cow dung, hard as cement, layered the floor, and the whole building slanted south, rafters crippled from too many Nebraska winters.

Terry strode inside and disappeared between the dimly-lit stanchions. Soon I heard the rhythmic scrape of his boots as he climbed the wooden slats into the loft, then silence. I stopped at the entrance, at the line where the shadow met the sunshine, afraid to step across.

Paralyzed, all I could hear was the roar behind my eyes. Then, the cool darkness calmed me, and I stepped inside. I could see Terry through the broken boards of the ceiling as he walked carefully on the joists to a solid section at the north end of the haymow. I climbed the wall like a spider into the loft, where sunlight filtered through the untended shingles.

Terry was sitting in a pile of dusty straw beside the hayloft door with what looked like a dried chamois in his hands. As I eased myself down beside him on our little island of wood, he showed me an old rabbit pelt that he had found. Someone must have cured it in the barn and forgotten about it. He studied it intently, his dark-rimmed glasses sliding down his slender nose. I focused on him, his carefully tended crew cut, his always-too-short blue jeans, and his familiar scuffed work boots.

Abruptly, he stood up, turned the wooden stop that fastened the loft door shut, and pulled the door around to the right, its rusty hinges creaking. Our eyes squinted in the sunlight, but soon we could see for miles across the brown and green and yellow patchwork plains, the orderly roads meeting at perfect ninety-degree angles, over and over again. The white dome of the courthouse rose out of the cluster of trees that was Minden, and to the west, we could see the white silhouettes of the grain elevators at Motela, Keene, and Axtell. Then, slowly and carefully, he tore the rabbit skin in half and shared with me.

The bidding done, the cars began their snail-like procession north, growing smaller and smaller until they disappeared into the trees. Soon, we knew, my family would also be heading north, beyond Minden into a different life. We watched together in silence, each stroking our piece of fur, so stiff and sharp and soft.