In Need of a Good Wife (34 page)

Leo and Nit took the wagon into town to get feed, much to the horses’ horror. They stamped and shuddered, shimmying down the lane like something possessed. The trip would be a slow one, Elsa could see.

By the afternoon, the heat had ebbed by a few degrees—though it was still as dry as a bone. Elsa glanced out the kitchen window to see Ully running at top speed, her awkward legs like miniature windmills churning behind her, her cropped hair spreading out like a fan. When she got to the kitchen door, she shouted to Elsa that she was coming inside.

“No, you don’t!” Elsa shouted back, wiping her hands on her apron and coming to the door. “Not until we get those filthy things off you.” She stepped outside and swatted at the back of Ully’s dress, gave the girl’s hair a vigorous rub, then ushered her into the kitchen.

“My word,” Elsa said, and Ully sat down at the table. Elsa poured her a mug of lukewarm tea. “You drink this now, and then you’re going to have another.”

Ully scowled. “How many times you want me in the privy today?”

Elsa gave her a warning look. “First of all, young ladies do not speak about those sorts of things. Second, Dr. Owen says we must all drink plenty in this heat. Understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Ully said sweetly.

They sipped their tea in silence. Elsa glanced out the window. All day long the blue had been fading from the sky, like dye leaving a garment that has been washed too many times. There were no clouds, but everything had dulled. The sun was worn out from shining.

As soon as Ully drained her mug, she burst out with a surprising piece of news. “I think Mrs. Gibson is going to leave,” she said, glancing carefully at Elsa.

“What do you mean?”

“She’s been gathering up her things, packing them in her trunk.”

“Now Ully, let’s not start rumors.”

“Elsa, she pressed the good dress she hasn’t worn once since she arrived, and packed away the little Bible she keeps near her bed.”

That Rowena Gibson kept a Bible near her bed! Would wonders never cease? Elsa thought for a moment. “Well. What does your father say about it?”

“Not a word. He told me to go out and play. I think he forgot that our whole town is under siege.”

Something about this phrase made Elsa smile. It was no exaggeration, of course. The grasshoppers were a true plague. But it was a colorful sort of thing to say, something a reader would say, an educated woman full of wit, which was what Ully really could grow into being, if she wanted to. If she had someone to help her.

“And what do you say about it? About Mrs. Gibson’s leaving?”

“Good riddance is what I say,” Ully answered, her eyes darting down to the table. “I never liked her and she never liked me.”

Elsa saw it at once: Ully’s feelings were hurt. She had never been able to win Rowena over.
Don’t do that to yourself,
Spatzchen, Elsa thought.
The world is full of Rowenas, women
who could cut you to the quick with
their cruel appraisals of what
they think you are. You have to know your own sacredness in order
to endure them. You have to know that you have been created for a
reason that has everything to do with
what is good and what is
righteous. And no one can ever take that away from you.
How could Elsa make her see?

“Leaving, just like that,” Elsa said, thinking, watching Ully carefully. “Well, I suppose not everyone is cut out for life on the prairie.”

She slid a slice of the leftover tart onto a plate and set it down in front of Ully, then refilled the mug of tea and opened a tin of chocolates. “But some of us are.”

“Yes,” Ully said, looking up at her. “Some of us are.”

In times of trouble, small kindnesses could come to mean everything.

The sheriff let Clara alone, didn’t come around checking up on her every few days as she had feared he would. That was a small kindness, even if kindness wasn’t what he intended. Mrs. Healy found more little jobs for Clara to do and paid her generously for them. She didn’t make her wait for the end of the month to get her money either. That, too, was a kindness.

Despite what she was up against, Clara found herself growing strangely fond of Destination. This town and its terrible weather, the feeling that it was so far removed from the rest of the world that even God had forgotten about it—somehow the place was growing on her. It was just awful enough to have potential, nowhere to go but up. Albright, Luft, and Drake weren’t backing down, but not everyone had it in for her. Some were happy with their new wives; Clara could take a small amount of credit for her part in that.

And Mr. Cartwright nearly felt like a friend. Most days he sent Sergeant trotting over from the town hall at least once to say hello to her in the tavern. Sometimes the hound carried a note of encouragement in his teeth.
In spite of rock and tempest’s
roar, in spite of false lights on the shore
, one read,
Sail on, nor fear
to breast the sea! Our hearts, our hopes, are all with
thee
. Clara pressed the notes into her apron pocket and sent Sergeant back to his master with a bone in his teeth. When she asked the mayor about it later on he said he didn’t have a thing to do with the note. It was probably Sergeant up to his old tricks, wasting lamp oil in the night on Longfellow.

It wouldn’t do to dwell on any fleeting good fortune, lest she tempt her miserable destiny to find her, Clara thought sharply but too late. It was only one day later when she climbed the stairs to find that George had ransacked their room and taken all the money. The drawers hung open like wagging tongues; the mattress drooped halfway off the bed. He had rifled through Clara’s trunk, ripping the seam on one of the silk pockets. What a fool he was, Clara thought, not to have first checked the most obvious place, the basket of soiled laundry where the money waited in yesterday’s apron. He could have saved himself all that effort of tearing the room apart before he found it. That George was far from clever made it all worse somehow. It didn’t take long for her to hear what people were saying, that Stuart Moran had seen him leave Destination on the eastbound train. George had left her again, without a penny.

Clara was so tired, so worn out from worry, that the prospect of jail began to seem like a solution to her life’s troubles. She tried to picture her cell—a narrow, windowless room with a small bed and nothing else to speak of. Perhaps it made no difference whether she wound up in her much-dreamed-of white cottage or a jail cell; the outcome would be the same.

Peace. Time. Distance from this sorrow that never left the two of them, a sorrow she wouldn’t acknowledge, a sorrow George couldn’t
stop
acknowledging, over and over and over again. She saw for certain that he wasn’t going to come back this time.

In a haze, Clara found her way to Elsa out at Leo Schreier’s farm. The land looked as if it had been burned. The tall ribbons of yellow-green grass were long gone, the cottonwoods stripped bare as in the deepest phase of winter. But somewhere, still, the grasshoppers were eating. Clara could hear the low buzzing that was a permanent fixture across the prairie.

The sun was just breaking the horizon when Clara arrived. She stood outside the kitchen door, peering in at Elsa sitting at the table with Mr. Schreier. Their empty dishes sat beside them and he was reading something to her from a book with his glasses down low on the bridge of his nose. Clara couldn’t make out his words but Elsa suddenly giggled, her hand flying to her mouth. Mr. Schreier looked up at her. Then his eyes caught Clara’s figure in the doorway.

“I believe you have a visitor,” he said.

Elsa turned in her chair to look, then stood and came to the door. “Miss Bixby—what a surprise!” Clara stepped into the light of the kitchen. Her face must have revealed her state of mind, for Elsa took her hand. “Is something the matter?” she whispered. “I’ve heard in town that the sheriff is not letting up.”

Mr. Schreier could sense that a long feminine conversation of the sort he dreaded was imminent. He finished tying his boots in the corner, then slipped by the women and took his hat from the hook. “Good day, ladies.”

When the door closed behind him, Clara sat down at the table before Elsa had the chance to offer her a chair. She folded her hands beneath her chin. “Mr. Bixby has taken his leave of me once again.”

“Oh, dear,” Elsa said, sitting down across from her.

“He took every penny I saved this last month.” Clara explained about Rowena’s testimony, the sheriff’s plans for a hearing. “I have twelve days left until I must pay those men in full. It’s impossible. It seems I will be going to jail.”

Elsa sat up very straight and shook her head. “Nonsense. We aren’t going to let that happen.”

Clara smiled. “Well, the only way to avoid it is to come up with a great deal of money. Do you happen to have that pressed between the pages of your Bible?”

“I do not,” Elsa said, her tone grim. “You could leave town—surely we could scrape the funds together to put you on a train.”

“But where would I go? What would I do? I don’t have the energy for it. And I didn’t do anything wrong—not intentionally. The things Rowena Gibson is saying are
not
true. I didn’t pick and choose whom to help. Everything would have come out all right if I had steered clear of George.” Clara put her face in her hands. “Oh, why did I ever take that man back?”

“Because you were trying to honor the union in which the Lord joined you.”

“I wish I could say that were the reason. But I think it was loneliness, pure and simple. I had the chance of having him back again, and I took it, however unlikely it was to endure.”

Elsa nodded.
“To the hungry soul, every bitter thing is sweet.”

“Indeed,
every
bitter thing. More, even, than you know.”

With George gone, Clara couldn’t bear to be the only one in the world who knew. She looked at Elsa. Elsa waited patiently with her hands in her lap.

When Clara was a young girl, spending afternoons combing out the yarn hair of her dolls with her sisters, playing jacks on the floor of the pantry, she felt quite literally that if she didn’t tell her sisters about a thing, it just hadn’t occurred. The neighbor’s dog had growled at her in the alley only after it scared Maura to hear the story. A rich lady smiled and waved at Clara from a passing carriage and Clara knew it was so when Frances got dreamy-eyed hearing the tale of it. The things she kept from them, the things she forgot to tell, evaporated into nothing like the bits of a dream. The
telling
was what made it real.

So Clara began to tell it. “There was a baby,” she said.

Four simple words. She had finally uttered them aloud now, and in doing so made the fact of him, and the fact of his wrenching unmaking, a real, true thing, forever.

Elsa took a sharp breath. “A
baby
,” she whispered. She took Clara’s hand and pressed it between her palms, then held it as the long, sad tale unfolded.

“His name was Michael.” Clara spoke in an even tone, as if she were talking about someone else, a woman in a myth from long ago. She told Elsa everything—meeting George and getting into trouble, about how it felt to be so big she could no longer hide it, how she didn’t mind. God had never answered a single one of Clara’s prayers all her life, but the promise of that baby felt like one big belated answer. She felt maybe he had been listening all along, felt he was finally going to give her something precious, something true. Clara counted the days and she sewed and sewed, waiting. It made the terrible shock of it all going wrong so much worse, that hopeful feeling she had for a while. When the labor finally began, it surged ceaselessly for days. The pain, bashing in her back like a hammer, knifing all the way down from her neck to her knees, was unbearable. By the time Michael slid into George’s arms at last, Clara was at the bottom of the fever’s deep cavern, too ill and weak to put the baby to her breast.

Clara began to cry now, and Elsa cried too. There was nothing to do but split the sorrow between them, break it in half. That was what a friend could do, Clara saw. She could help you carry it.

After a while, Elsa sighed. “We are all such secrets from each other, aren’t we?”

“Yes,” Clara said, letting the truth of those words rest between them in the room for a while. “It was my fault, you see.”

“No! What could you have done? It was not in your hands.”

“Perhaps, if I had tried harder to shake off the fever, if I had just
tried
, I could have fed him, helped him survive. I won’t ever know for sure.”

“You
must
. You must know it. You cannot blame yourself just because there’s no way to understand it.”

“I just can’t help it. I think about it all the time.”

Elsa set her jaw, her face as stern as Clara had ever seen it. She seemed to sense a dangerous kind of desperation in Clara’s voice, that she might now be willing to do anything to escape her misery for good. “You
will
go on, just as you have always done. And we will find you that money.”

Clara gave her a wry smile. “If there’s any paper money left in this county, the grasshoppers will find it before we do.”

“No,” Elsa shook her head. “Don’t do that. Don’t make it a joke.”

“Elsa, I have to face the truth—there is no more hope for me.”

“There is always, always hope. In the darkest corner of the world.”

“I cannot wait around for the Lord to come save me, Elsa, as much as I
do
admire the strength of your belief.”

“I’m not talking about the Lord,” Elsa said. “You’re going to save yourself. We’ll think of something.”

It had been a week since the grasshoppers descended on Destination, and everyone in town had been driven just about out of their minds. Mr. Gibson was keeping limited hours at the shop because few people were willing to leave the shelter of their homes and venture out into the ravenous swarm. The idea of hitching up the wagon was inconceivable; the horses simply could not tolerate the hoppers crawling around their flanks, diving to and fro before their eyes. Lambert Kellinger, the mayor’s uncle, had told Daniel that he tried once on the first day of the hoppers’ arrival to saddle his horse out next to the barn and before he could climb on, the insects had devoured the leather harness and the wool blanket that hung beneath the saddle.