Plains Song (7 page)

Just as Emerson had warned them, a house with a basement only halfway beneath it looked strange. One had to go up a flight of four steps to the porch, which few women could do holding two pails of water. Holding nothing at all, a man could fall and break his leg. It put Emerson in mind of a Burlington caboose. All winter long, when the trees were bare, he would have no choice but to look at it. Every morning he would look at it, then say to Cora, “You think they plan to live in it?” The easygoing, patient side of Emerson was based on what he found to be customary, but a house that sat up on concrete blocks looked to him like something on a flatcar. He wished it was. He wished he could wake up and see it was gone.

A further affront was the notions that Orion had picked up somewhere about farming. He wanted no more chickens, since Cora had them, than he would need to keep a few fresh eggs on the table. Milk and cream he would get from Cora, so he wouldn't need cows. The only way you would know he was living in the country was the whine of the pigs when he fed them, and the smell they made when the wind died down. He kept so many pigs he had to buy swill and cart it from Battle Creek in a wagon. Behavior like that so disturbed Emerson he would talk at night. It was not to Cora, so she never knew if it was in his sleep, or awake and to himself. The discovery, which he
made by chance, that Orion planned to enlarge the basement with the house already built above it was a thing so strange and imponderable to Emerson he could not find words to describe it. No, it stumped him. Standing before Cora, his gaze averted to the window that looked toward Orion, he would lift the front plate on the range and spit a gob on the fire that would crackle the corn shucks. That's how he felt, and that's all he could do to relieve his mind.

Before the windows were screened, or the porch built at the front, Belle Rooney's father came up from the Ozarks with three hound dogs in the seat of his buggy. The sad-eyed bitch of the three was about to litter. Mr. Rooney talked freely, with gestures of his hands, but Cora found it hard to understand him. Her feeling was that Belle's people were gypsies. He proved to know nothing to speak of about pigs or farming, but he had no objection to the people who did it. He lived on what he shot and the fish he caught, and he and Orion went hunting up the Elkhorn to shoot a few wolves and collect the bounty. They didn't see any wolves, but they brought back to Belle a baby raccoon which the hound bitch seemed willing to suckle. It disturbed Cora to think that such a sensible dog didn't know its own kind. After Mr. Rooney left, Emerson caught the coon at the back of the stable with one of Cora's chickens. Orion had the option to shoot it himself or take it back up the Elkhorn where he found it, which he claimed he did. It was during this summer that Cora worried what might rub off Belle onto Beulah Madge.

It turned out that Belle liked to make her own candles, and burned them more than she did the lamp. If Cora went over with a pan of biscuits, or a plate of fresh butter, she might find Belle running around the house barefoot, like a child. Her hair looked as if it might have birds nesting in it, and it worried Cora that she might have mites, and give them to Madge. It was also her custom, now that she had a few of her own, to let the chickens have the run of the house, as well as the hounds. A more irksome problem was the bitch, Lou, and her puppies, which she nursed in a box behind the range. If Cora spoke to Orion, he would put his head to one side and laugh. Something loose in his own nature seemed to be at ease with a girl like Belle. Nor was she any different when she proved to be pregnant and found it harder to hold and fondle Madge. As her breasts swelled, and her blouse gaped unbuttoned, it shamed Cora to admit what she was thinking. If left alone, she feared Belle would give her breast to Madge. Sensible as Cora was, she suffered the superstition that the wildness in Belle's nature might be there in her milk, corrupting the child. Belle had her own strange opinions and considered milk that had been separated no better than water, and fit only for pigs. If a pig was butchered, the pork had to be stored in its own fat. In these matters she stared at Cora with the eyes of a child at a side show, astonished by the freaks. The many things that Cora knew did not impress her, but what she didn't know defied accounting. Cora's patience was often so tried she pretended to sleep if Belle paid her a visit, but she was a godsend
with the washing and had a man's strength cranking the wringer. Cora never seemed to tire of watching her string up the sheets, her face flushed and radiant with exertion, the clothespins in her mouth clamped so firmly she left her teeth marks on them. Everything she handled she had to smell before she put it down. Freshly washed and ironed clothes, a ladle of butter, berries and peas sorted for cooking, as well as both the laundered and the dirty diapers. She sniffed the child as well, running her finger in the folds of flesh before they were powdered, lidding her eyes as she held the finger to her nose. Yet it was Belle, surely, who taught Beulah Madge to talk. Cora picked her up, fed her, and put her down, but Belle would carry her about to look at the chickens, or into the barn while Emerson was milking, all the time babbling her shrill hillbilly talk. Cora hoped that such speech would come slow to Madge, but even the chickens might learn it if they heard enough of it. She marveled at a creature who was at once so ignorant and so alive. In midmorning, her chores finished, she would come running through the trees between the two houses more like a frightened calf than a young woman. Cora could hear her coming. The next moment there she would be, standing at the screen like an anxious puppy. Her manner suggested that Cora had called her, her cheeks red as a fever. She wore a shift made of flour sacks, and would lift her skirts to wipe her hands clean on the underside.

“Where's she at?” she would ask, and look around as if Cora had hidden
her
baby. What Belle liked
about caring for a child was seeing how everything worked; where and what went in, and if and what came out, was to her of great importance. She had nobody but Orion to tell her she shouldn't take such an interest in another woman's child. Why didn't Cora tell her? She simply didn't feel the interest that Belle felt. She felt duties toward the child, and concern for her, but was not so eager as Belle to hug, fondle, and pet her. In her childish way Belle was cruel to Cora, fingering her blouse buttons even while she was prattling, but that was through ignorance, not intent. Yet seeing them together, Belle curling her finger to offer the child the nub of her knuckle to suckle, Cora knew that in this matter Belle was not to be trusted. She knew that and admired it, feeling shame for this lack in herself.

For all her prattling, Belle told Cora little about herself. Her darting blackberry eyes (Orion's description) were made to look all around her but not within her. Like a child, watching Cora at her ironing, she would pick the buggers out of her nose. Her glances were not so cruel as indifferently curious, passing over the flatness of Cora's bust, her jaw slack as she strained to visualize how she must look in her nightshirt, a picture that Cora took pains not to gratify. She would have liked someone like Mrs. Geltmayer to give her an opinion of Belle. A good enough girl, but wild. Something like that. Orion would be the one to know her best, but it was unthinkable that Cora might ask him. Compared with Emerson, he still seemed youthful. Did his strange young wife perhaps confess to him,
at night, that she would like to nurse Cora's child before the bottle had rotted its teeth or impoverished its nature? In her soul Cora knew that Belle would do whatever came naturally.

In the Ozarks Belle had been accustomed to Sunday being more social. She saw all of her relations. Sunday without them was simply not Sunday. In the side yard of the church she played with the children, scuffing the toes of her good Sunday shoes. Orion could not restrain her. He could only wait until she tired. “She's like a rabbit,” he would say, as they watched her, but it was one of many words he applied to Belle. Riding home in the buggy, she would fall to sucking on a strand of her hair. Her habit of thrusting out her lower lip and blowing a cooling draft of air up her face provoked Cora. Cora had seen to it that the cats stayed in the barns, where they paid for their keep and were useful, only to find that Belle came to her for milk she carried back to her house and fed stray kittens. They were everywhere. Did she understand that kittens grew up to be cats? It seemed to Cora she was much too young to be a mother, although not too young, obviously, to become one, her tummy protruding at her front like a baby's. Nobody at all, unless it was Belle, proved to be prepared for it when it came, such a little thing it gave her no trouble. Being another girl, it annoyed Emerson. She was named Sharon Rose, after Belle's mother. She proved to be a black-haired, fair-skinned child with a birthmark where nobody would be likely to see it. The way the child nursed with her eyes wide open disturbed Cora. By her own calculation
the child came five weeks early, which made her an easier baby to handle, nor did it cross Cora's mind that there might be a flaw in her calculations. Sharon Rose was Belle's baby. Orion seemed to have little to do with it.

Only in the first summer of their acquaintance did Madge, in Cora's opinion, enjoy an advantage over Sharon Rose. She had her to watch, and on occasion to whack with the wooden spoon she loved to chew on. Soon enough Sharon Rose would take the initiative.

A squirming, obstinate child, she wanted down if she was lifted, she wanted lifting if she was down, on her back if she was on her stomach, on her stomach if she was on her back, resistant to stroking, quick to fret, pull on beads, hairpins, ear lobes, and hairnets, waking
at night to shriek in such a manner even Emerson took note of it. In his opinion it was only early babies that howled like that. It made Cora grateful for Madge, who would be silent until she was banged by Sharon Rose. If Cora placed a netting over the crib she would drop off to sleep, like a bird in a cage. Out the window, in the space of one summer, went all the talk she had heard about bottle babies, little Sharon Rose, even in Orion's opinion, nursing as if she meant to eat Belle alive. If she was raised from the floor, she would paw at Belle until she was nursed. It shamed Cora to hear Emerson say, “Put that one in the barn and she'd find the milk tit.”

Because the plump Madge hardly seemed to care, and would as soon look at Sharon as not look at her, it seemed sensible, even to Cora, to treat the two girls as one. Belle would either come over and pick up Madge, or she would bring Sharon Rose along with her, Madge seated like a bucket on her fat bottom while Sharon Rose crawled, squirmed, and fretted around her. Madge's hand-me-downs were large, but so much the better for Sharon Rose to grow into. In Belle's house, which still lacked curtains, the little girls were put on the rugless floor and given blocks to play with. Floor splinters turned up in both knees and diapers. Belle said she found the shrieks and howls reassuring, a sign of life. For several weeks the girls shared the same bottle, Belle's nipple being too sore and chapped for nursing. Cora would not have liked that if she had heard it, but she didn't hear. The babies had their runny, snotty colds together, and their runny,
smelly diapers together, but an early blizzard, followed by a heavy snow, kept the girls apart during most of January. The drift of snow between the two farms was more than five feet deep. In March Sharon Rose had a rash about her nose and mouth, and Belle was subject to morning sickness and a nagging cough. She was expecting again, but it seemed reasonable to assume that this one would be a nine months' baby. It was a bad time for Cora, the winter breaking, the whole yard like a pond with the ice melting, and it might be that her feelings for Sharon Rose were not as friendly as back in November. The rash made her fretful and demanding. Did she sense Cora's reluctance to pick her up? She fell silent, rather than quiet. Missing her howling, her fretting, Cora would have to stop her work and go find her. Often she would be under the dining room table, concealed by the cloth that hung to the casters, a look of cunning and satisfaction behind her long, tangled lashes. In the eyes of Madge one saw only the window reflections. It absorbed her to watch and ponder Sharon Rose as the hound bitch Lou watched and pondered Orion oiling and cleaning his guns.

Although a nine months' child, Eula Stacy Atkins weighed even less at her birth than Sharon Rose. Nor was the third female child to be fathered by an Atkins a cause for rejoicing to Emerson. Was it a jinx? he asked Dr. Geltmayer. Belle was soon up and about, but the same milk that was so good for Sharon Rose gave Eula the worst kind of colic. A wet nurse in Battle Creek took the child during April, but when Belle got
her back she didn't feel right about her. She was able to nurse her, part time, but Eula would only suckle in the bed at night, as if she didn't want to see whom she was nursing. Nor did she take well to napping with her sister, or find it absorbing to watch Madge. This new baby took all of Belle's attention, much of her sleep, yet she never really felt as she should about it. She was surely wrong in thinking, and admitted to thinking, that Eula thought the wet nurse, Mrs. Raike, was her mother, and she, Belle, was just her wet nurse. But she was right in thinking, in Dr. Geltmayer's opinion, that Mrs. Raike wanted the child for herself. That was only natural. Her own child had died at birth, and she had milk in her breasts that pained her. Belle confided to Cora that such women were able to put a hex on the nursing baby, so that it was only the milk of the wet nurse they liked. Cora had met Mrs. Raike, a huge, sad woman who tilted the buggy getting up and down from it, speaking only German to the hired hand who brought her to church. Mr. Raike was a freethinker and an agnostic.