Prairie Widow (18 page)

Jennifer knocked them off and grabbed a book. “They will not,” she said, her voice trembling. “This will pass.”

And the three went about the room, swatting at the alldevouring creatures with books. When they were done, the room was splotched with crushed grasshopper bodies. Most of the clothing and linen were in tatters. What did survive was stained by the insects' brown spit, which was like tobacco juice.

Meanwhile, the roar outside had stopped. The windows once more showed blue sky and open land. “Did they go?” asked Peter, still grasping a book.

Jennifer went to the window. The grasshoppers had not gone. The grass from the dugout to the horizon was scythed down and flat, buried beneath a thick mat of the seething insects. Here and there, a solitary grasshopper took off like a stray spark from the smoldering mass.

The maddened mule had run off, his tether eaten through by the grasshoppers. The hay-covered stall itself had caved in from the weight of the dropping insects. The two chickens, perhaps feeling luckier, were crazed by the manna, and, though they had already become fat and round and could not move so fast, they continued to walk atop the churning insect bodies, their scrawny necks stretched downward as they plucked up grasshopper after grasshopper.

Jennifer threw her tattered shawl about her shoulders and stepped outside. “Momma, don't!” cried Emma. She made as if to follow, but neither she nor her brother were eager to step barefoot onto the insects.

“Close the door!” said Jennifer, turning. Her children did so to keep more grasshoppers from spilling in. Then they hurried to a window.

“Maw!” came Peter's muffled voice from behind the pane.

But Jennifer walked away from the dugout. As she did so, she stirred up grasshoppers in her path, sending them hopping and flying in sprays and splashes. It wasn't long before the lower part of her skirt was covered with the clinging insects. But she paid them little mind. She passed the garden, where all that could be seen of her vegetables were shards of watermelon rind embedded in the mat of jostling insects. She stopped by the well. Its sod wall was covered with grasshoppers. The bucket held a soup of dead and drowning insects. An acrid smell arose from both the bucket and from the well pit. And as she looked out at the unearthly vista, Jennifer saw no bird, no butterfly, but she heard something else upon the wind—the crunching of millions upon millions of tiny jaws eating, eating…

What madness! thought Jennifer. The sky forever buffets this land, and pounds it, and spits on it, and tears at it!

And yet, even as she gazed upon a prairie once more besieged, she knew that the sod below was already pregnant with the grasses and flowers that would emerge next spring. Then, as happened the year before, and would no doubt happen every year, there would return a fresh sea of grass— bluestems mostly, but others, too—and there would be all those hosts of recurring, stubborn flowers: the mats of cat's paw and pasque flower, the many asters and daisies, the aptly named bird's-foot, the milkweed with its swarms of monarch butterflies, the goldenrod, the great sunflower, and perhaps even—so it seemed—the prairie widow.