Ruby & Roland Read online

  As winter gave way to mud and crocuses, Frau Oster assigned me two additional chores. In the morning—when I’d gathered eggs and fed the chickens—I was to scrub the front and back stoops; and after school, I worked in the garden. The Osters were prodigious gardeners. While the front yard was given over to grass and flowers, the backyard was taken up with poultry and vegetables. Frau Oster spent four or five hours a day planting, fertilizing, watering, and weeding. If we were without rain for a week, we drew water from the cistern beside the back door. After school, I changed into an unknown boy’s overalls and fell to my hands and knees beside Frau Oster, kneeling in horticultural prayer. Home in the evening from his job at the county court house, Herr Oster joined us, working until the light was gone, stopping only to eat supper.

  One day in April, Herr Oster carried home from the post office a letter whose round postmark read “Beardsley, Illinois.” As he handed it to me, my heart jumped into my throat. Who on earth could be writing me from Beardsley? It wouldn’t be Aunt. Turning the envelope over, I read, “Barrett Cromwell, 326 Augustus Street.” Denton’s colleague! Eyes dimmed, I climbed up the stairs to my room. Though it was time to lay out supper, this letter wouldn’t wait.

  Dear Ruby,

  Whenever I walk past the house where you lived with Denton and Serena, I think of you and wonder how you are faring. Following a rather unpleasant exchange, your great-aunt Bertha at length parted with your address, and I can only trust that you are still in Salisbury. If you should leave there, please keep me apprised of your whereabouts.

  I am completing my doctorate and now head the Science and Mathematics Department at the normal school. With the promotion comes a welcome rise in income. I am more than happy to share that rise with you, little Ruby, if you have need of it. Now or later. Do not hesitate.

  My life is quiet. When the teaching day is ended, I spend a good many hours working on a quixotic project having to do with automobile engines, of all things! I will not bore you with details. It is nothing that could possibly interest a delightful thirteen-year-old girl. You are thirteen now, correct?

  I miss Serena and Denton. I can only imagine your grief. Your parents were great fun and so kind. I hope that the world is treating you as they treated me.

  I hold you in my thoughts.

  Your servant,

  Barrett Cromwell

  I lay back on the bed and wept, soaking the cotton fabric beneath my head. After fifteen or twenty minutes, Frau Oster ventured a quiet knock at the door and poked her head in.

  “Bad news, yes?” She came to the bed looking concerned and proffering me a clean handkerchief.

  I shook my head and handed her the letter, unsure if she could read or understand it. She spent minutes poring over it, her large brow furrowed, one hand twisting a strand of loose hair as she concentrated. I was moved by her desire to grasp the contents. At last she nodded. “It remind you of Mama and Papa, yes?”

  I nodded. “But also, it’s just so kind. Sometimes kindness can make you cry. You see?”

  “Ach, ja. I see.” She bent and patted my cheek. “You come when you ready,” she said, and left.

  Before going downstairs, I wept a little more because Frau Oster too was kind. What a weeping fool I was becoming.

  Before bed that night, I penned a note back to Professor Cromwell.

  “The kindness of your letter overwhelms me,” I wrote. “Wherever Serena and Denton are—and I believe they are in a warm and sunny place, living in a big airy house with a cupola—they would send their greetings and affection. And their gratitude for your generosity.

  “I thank you for your offer to share the raise that came with your wonderful doctorate, but there is no necessity. The Osters with whom I am living provide everything I need.

  “When I think of Serena and Denton, and that is hourly, I imagine all of us in that big house, standing around a piano which Mrs. Bullfinch is playing. The windows are thrown open and we are all singing ‘Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home’ and ‘In the Good Old Summer Time.’

  “Serena has made iced tea, and you have brought eclairs from the bakery. We eat a bit and sing a song and Denton tells a joke, something about President Roosevelt and his horse.

  “When I imagine us around the piano, time slips away. I am able to do this many times a day, making myself happy again and again.”

  • • •

  The Osters and I attended two church services on Sundays, both in German. With a rare and welcome resort to words, Frau Oster told me that I could bring along something appropriate to read. I chose Walt Whitman, whose aptness she might have questioned had she known, but on a warm June Sunday, surely even the Lutheran minister could entertain no quibble with “Me Imperturbe.”

  “O to be self-balanced for contingencies,” I read, “to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.” I did not always understand Whitman, but these words were clear and they appealed. I would like to be ready for all contingencies. At the same time, I couldn’t help wondering if I were made of such stern stuff. Or was I like the peonies whose unearthly beauty and soft, fragrant petals had been pounded, tattered, and scattered by a storm the previous week? Then I had run into the front yard, gathering petals in my fists and weeping.

  “Nein, nein,” Frau Oster murmured, patting my shoulder and plucking a red zinnia for me.

  When school let out for the summer, Frau Oster added house chores to my duties. Now, I scrubbed the painted floors upstairs, cleaned the oak ones downstairs, then waxed and polished all. In Beardsley, I’d only had to keep my room clean, set the table, wash dishes, and help with sweeping and dusting occasionally. Still, the Osters fed and clothed me and did not mistreat me. And though they were mostly silent, I learned that this silence had grown out of the loss of a child several years before, a boy named Rudolph. After this, I felt a painful tenderness toward them. So plain, so silent, so lonely, for I was not their child. If I’d been a tot when I came, perhaps they could have taken me for a surrogate. But I could not have replaced Rudolph any more than the Osters could replace Serena and Denton. People are not interchangeable.

  In early summer of my third year with the Osters, news arrived from across the ocean that they had been named heirs to a small estate in Bavaria. We had just come in from the garden and were washing up when someone knocked at the front door. A message had come to town on the telegraph wire. The Osters were dumbfounded by the news of their good fortune. Well, not dumbfounded, for they cried “Gott im himmel” over and over, dancing around the kitchen, laughing and weeping and hugging each other. At length Frau Oster stopped dancing and, taking her husband’s cheeks in her rough hands, asked, “What of Rudolph?”

  Then they sat down at the table, Herr Oster across from his wife, massaging his fists with old grief as he looked to her. She shook her head in bewildered dismay, her broad, plain face a painting of sorrow.

  Moments before, they had been so happy.

  All that evening they spoke in low voices, taking turns to pace. I finally climbed the stairs, put on my nightgown, and lay on the bed, gazing out at the night sky. Those same stars had earlier shone over Bavaria. Now where would I be sent, I wondered.

  By morning, the Osters had decided that they would sell the house, buy passage to Europe, and have Rudolph’s casket disinterred and shipped across the ocean, if not on their ship, then on another. They asked me if I wanted to come with them to Bavaria, but I told them, after some thought, that I would not be happy an ocean away from Serena and Denton.

  The newspaper editor was consulted, and word went out that a strong, healthy fifteen-year-old girl with good references was looking for a place. Long before the Osters left on an early October sailing, I was on my way to a farm outside a town called Harvester in southern Minnesota to work for a family named Schoonover.

  The depot lay at the northernmost edge of Salisbury, and as we stood on the dusty platform that afternoon, a hot September wind blew o
ff the prairie, pressing our skirts tight against our legs. Again and again, a tearful Frau Oster took me into her arms and called me a “fery gut girl.” Perhaps they had come to think of me not as a replacement for Rudolph, of course, but as another of their children.

  Frau Oster had packed a lunch for me in a small pasteboard box. With each embrace, we crushed it between us. When the train arrived, my trunk was loaded onto the baggage car, and a now tearful Herr Oster shyly pressed two dollars into my hand. I was helped up the iron steps by the conductor, and found a seat by a window looking out at the Osters and Salisbury.

  As the train drew away, the three of us waved until we could see each other no longer.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Around five o’clock, the train pulled into a station so like the one in Salisbury, I would have thought we’d traveled in a circle had “Harvester” not been printed on the side of the gray building.

  On the platform, a lone woman stood waiting. The brim of her straw hat fluttered in the prairie wind. Drawing the sleeve of her dress across her brow, she wiped away perspiration. Advancing, she greeted me. She was Emma Schoonover, she said, and I was to call her Emma. She had not expected a pretty girl, she went on. Was I pretty?

  From the tone of Emma Schoonover’s words, pretty was something she had not bargained for nor desired. She quickly bethought herself, however, and cast me a flickering smile. She was brusque without being cold. I believe “harried” is the word I want. September was, after all, an extremely busy time on a farm. This I knew from living in two farm towns before coming here.

  As we waited for my small trunk to be lowered from the train and carried by the depot clerk to the woman’s buggy, I glanced sidelong, trying not to gawk. Emma was perhaps forty and comely without being beautiful, or so I thought at the time. Possibly farm life had robbed her of earlier beauty.

  “Up since four a.m.” she explained, as if I’d inquired. “Big breakfast for the threshers.” Eggs, steak, homemade bread and gravy, pies, egg coffee.

  Her spine as straight as a ruler, Emma held the reins loosely but with authority. As we rode out of town, I admired the endless prairie sky, blue as a delphinium.

  Emma Schoonover spoke little on the remainder of the drive to the Schoonover farm west of Harvester. She did tell me that Mr. Schoonover was “Henry,” and asked if I knew how to milk a cow, which I did not.

  “I can gather eggs, though.”

  Driving along, raising a feather boa of dust behind us, we passed first the Protestant and then the Catholic cemeteries on our right, both beautifully planted with trees and flowering bushes. And so many bodies planted as well! Headstones were thick on the ground.

  The earliest days on the farming frontier had been perilous, and they were not long past. Men and women died of exposure, disease, suicide, farm accidents, and half a dozen other causes. The blizzard of ’88, I would learn, took hundreds. The loneliness of the wide, mostly empty prairie found a way to claim folks.

  Beyond the cemeteries, the buggy turned in at a tree-lined and graveled drive leading to an impressive white clapboard house with a broad front porch, nicely turned columns supporting its slanting roof. The yard lying immediately before was a haphazardly mowed swath of grass sloping down to the road we’d traveled, Cemetery Road.

  A big dog of unknown breed and mottled coat—tan, brown, white—came flying down the drive with a great hoo-ha of greeting, barking us all the way to the back gate. “Big lummox,” Emma said with fondness as she drew the buggy up. “Name’s Teddy, after Roosevelt.”

  The front door, I’d discover, was rarely used. Even guests and commercial travelers came to the back. The graveled farmyard around us was girded by a cow barn, a horse barn, a pig sty, and a machine shed, all of them painted a rich red. Beyond the machine shed stood corn cribs and silos. A small village of structures. Canny and prosperous, these people were hardworking too.

  Parked around the yard were several wagons, their horses let out to pasture till their owners claimed them at the end of the day. “Threshing hands,” Emma said. Nearby farmers and their hands came to help with the overwhelming task of threshing the grain; when the crew finished here, they and Henry and his hired men would move on to the next farm in the rotation. If dry weather continued, the grain on all the farms would soon be ready for storage and sale.

  “Dennis will carry your trunk in later,” Emma told me. “One of our hired men,” she explained.

  Off to the right of the screened back porch was a big chicken coop. And, to the right of that, a garden, fenced with chicken wire. As Emma and I stepped down, softly clucking chickens greeted us, preoccupied with pecking for seeds and grain in the grass and dirt. They were like old women intent upon their knitting but murmuring to one another. Outside the screeching gate, but not ten yards distant from the back door, stood a watering trough and a windmill clacking with the incessant prairie wind.

  Lost in dreams, perhaps, our somnolent buggy horses stood idly nickering as I followed my employer through the gate, across a short brick walk, up three steps, and into the screened porch, which smelled of sour milk. Another thing I was to learn: on a farm, even the most scrupulously clean back porch smells of sour milk. I don’t know why, but you get used to it. At the other end of the porch was a screen door leading to the four-hole outhouse. One hole for Emma, one for Henry, and two for the help, which included me of course. In those days, the outhouse was something you grew up with, its reek one more thing you got used to, along with iridescent-green-winged flies buzzing continually in warm weather.

  Raising an arm and pointing, Emma said, “Over there, past the garden, is the storm cellar.” It seemed a long way to dash in the event of a tornado. She went on, “We keep last year’s apples and carrots and potatoes in there. Also some butter, milk, and ice from the lake.”

  Inside the house, Emma carried my hat, carpetbag, and gloves to the parlor. When she left to unhitch the horses, I took the opportunity to look around the big kitchen, which was clean and tidy. In two corners, spiral ribbons of flypaper hung from the ceiling, lightly speckled with corpses. These ribbons were not so heavy laden as the ones I’d seen in the Salisbury depot. Emma probably renewed them often during warm months.

  Returning to the house, Emma seized a vast apron from hooks behind the kitchen door, thrusting it at me and grabbing another for herself. “Set the table,” she said, “while I get the chicken frying.” She nodded toward a tall cupboard where dishes were stacked. “There’ll be eight places. You and I’ll eat after.” From shelves beside the woodstove, she pulled a huge and weighty iron spider with both hands, heaving it onto the stove.

  Because the Schoonover farm didn’t claim a summer kitchen (most in these parts didn’t), this one was “hotter than a desperado’s pistol,” as Mrs. Bullfinch back in Beardsley would have said. Seeing me wipe my brow on my sleeve, Emma told me, “They want hot meat, even in this weather.” Shaking her head, she poured liquid lard into the spider. “They won’t be in from the field for at least another hour, but we have to be ready. Soon as they wash up out back, they want food.”

  I began setting plates and utensils on the long pine table, nervous about what was to come. What kind of men were these? Crude? Loud? Disrespectful? Emma’s remark that she hadn’t been expecting a pretty girl made me wonder.

  The men were dusty with wheat chaff. Though they’d washed their faces and hands and made a pass at brushing off the worst, the dust was in their ears, their hair, and the creases of their clothing, and they were too hungry to care. Hunger subdued their voices until they’d filled their bellies, and it robbed them of interest in a new hired girl.

  As they trooped from the kitchen after the final cup of coffee, laughing and chiding one another, they did cast sidelong glances at me as I carried away the remains of their meal. Several nodded. The next evening, when I’d been accepted as truly the new hired girl, they would introduce themselves.

  Following supper, the men returned to the field where they worked un
til no light remained. Then the visitors hitched up their horses and headed back to their homeplaces while the Schoonover hired men, Dennis and Jake, sat on the back steps smoking in the dark. Meanwhile, Emma and I had washed up, swept the kitchen and tidied. Now we dished out supper for ourselves, and sat down at the table. Eventually, Henry would join us, sipping a tot of liquor and reading something “picked up at Kolchak’s livery.”

  With the clatter of dinner ended, silence settled over the farm: only the singing of crickets beyond the open window, the occasional squawk from an awakened hen, and the soughing of cottonwoods in the grove gave evidence that the world hadn’t wandered off, leaving the three of us in a pale ochre circle of lamplight.

  Buttering an ear of corn, Emma told her husband, “This is the new girl, Henry. Her name’s Ruby.”

  He lowered his handbill, glanced at me, and nodded. “How-do.” Another time, he would have conversation, a time when he wasn’t weighted to the chair with exhaustion.

  “Well, what did you think?” Emma asked me, pouring herself a glass of buttermilk.

  I knew what she meant. “They seemed nice enough,” I remarked of the men who’d sat at the table. “They weren’t fresh.”

  We exchanged few words after that, both of us worn out.