The Best of Sisters in Crime (38 page)

Around
Halloween, that first year, Janos was passed up to me by the elementary
teacher. She said she had nothing more to teach him. I don’t know that I was
any better prepared than she was, except that the high school textbooks were on
the shelves in my room. I did my best.

Janos was a
challenge. He absorbed everything I had to offer and demanded more, pushing me
in his quiet yet insistent way to explain or to find out. He was eager for
everything. Except geography. There he was a doubter. Having lived his entire
life on a flat expanse of prairie, Janos would not believe the earth was a
sphere, or that there were bodies of water vaster than the wheatfields that
stretched past his horizon. The existence of mountains, deserts, and oceans, he
had to take on faith, like the heavenly world the nuns taught me about in
catechism.

Janos was an
oddball to his classmates, certainly. I can still see that shiny head bent
close to his books, the brow of his pinched little face furrowed as he took in
a new set of universal truths from the world beyond the Central Grain Exchange.
The other students deferred to him, respected him, though they never played
with him. He spent recesses and lunch periods sitting on the school’s front
stoop, waiting for me to ring the big brass bell and let him back inside. I
wonder how that affected him as a judge, this boy who never learned how to
play.

Janos shivered
when he was cold, but he seemed otherwise oblivious to external discomfort or
appearances. Both he and Boya came to school barefoot until there was snow on
the ground. Then they showed up in mismatched boots sizes too big, yet no one
called attention to them, which I found singular. Janos’s coat, even in
blizzards, was an old gray blanket that I’m sure he slept under at night. His
straight yellow hair stuck out in chunks as if it had been scythed like the
wheat. He never acknowledged that he was in any way different from his well-scrubbed
classmates.

While this
oblivion to discomfort gave Janos an air of stoic dignity, it did impose some
hardship on me. When the blizzards came and I knew school should be closed, I
went out anyway because I knew Janos would be there, with Boya. If I didn’t
come to unlock the classroom, I was sure they would freeze waiting.

Getting there
was itself a challenge. I boarded in town with the doctor and his wife, my dear
friend Martha. When the snow blew in blinding swirls and the road was
impassable to any automobile, I would persuade the doctor to harness his team
of plow horses to his cutter and drive me out. The doctor made only token
protest after the first trip: the boys had been at the school for some time
before we arrived, huddled together on the stoop like drifted snow.

Those were the
best days, alone, the two boys and I. I would bring books from Martha’s
shelves, books not always on the school board approved list. We would read
together, and talk about the world on the far side of the prairie and how one
day we would see it for ourselves. As the snow drifts piled up to the sills
outside, we would try to imagine the sultry heat of the tropics, the pitch and
roll of the oceans, men in pale suits in electric-lit parlors discussing being
and nothingness while they sipped hundred-year-old sherry.

We had many days
together. That year the first snow came on All Saints Day and continued
regularly until Good Friday. I would have despaired during the ceaseless cold
if it weren’t for Janos and the lessons I received at home on the evenings of
those blizzardy days.

Invariably, on
winter nights when the road was impassable and sensible people were at home
before the fire, someone would call for the doctor’s services. He would harness
the cutter, and go. Martha, of course, couldn’t sleep until she heard the
cutter return. We would keep each other entertained, sometimes until after the
sun came up.

Martha had gone
to Smith or Vassar. I’m not sure which because Eastern girls’ schools were so
far from my experience that the names meant nothing to me then. She was my
guide to the world I had only seen in magazines and slick-paged catalogues,
where people were polished to a smooth and shiny perfection, where long
underwear, if indeed any was worn, never showed below their hems. These people
were oddly whole, no scars, no body parts lost to farm machinery. In their
faces I saw a peace of mind I was sure left them open to the world of ideas. I
longed for them, and was sure Martha did as well.

Martha took life
in our small community with grace, though I knew she missed the company of
other educated women. I had to suffice.

Just as I spent
my days preparing Janos, Martha spent her evenings teaching me the social
graces I would need if I were ever to make my escape. Perhaps I was not as
quick a pupil as Janos, but I was as eager.

Lessons began in
the attic where Martha kept her trunks. Packed in white tissue was the elegant
trousseau she had brought with her from the East, gowns of wine-colored taffeta
moire and green velvet and a pink silk so fine I feared touching it with my
callused hands.

I had never
actually seen a live woman in an evening gown, though I knew Martha’s gowns
surpassed the mailorder gowns that a woman might order for an Eastern Star
ritual, if she had money for ready-made.

Martha and I
would put on the gowns and drink coffee with brandy and read to each other from
Proust, or take turns at the piano. I might struggle through a Strauss waltz or
the Fat Lady Polka. She played flawless Dvorak and Debussy. This was my
finishing school, long nights in Martha’s front parlor, waiting for the cutter
to bring the doctor home, praying the cutter hadn’t overturned, hoping the
neighbor he had gone to tend was all right.

When he did
return, his hands so cold he needed help out of his layers of clothes, Martha’s
standard greeting was, “Delivering Mrs. Bonachek?” This was a big joke to us,
because, of course, Mrs. Bonachek delivered herself. No one knew how many
pregnancies she had had beyond her nine living sons. Poor people, they were
rich in sons.

That’s what I
kept coming back to that early spring afternoon as I walked away from the
Bonachek farm. I had seen Janos running across the fields after school. If he
hadn’t been hurrying home to help his mother, then where had he gone? And where
were his brothers?

It lay on my
mind.

As I said, the
day in question had been perfectly ordinary. I had stayed after my students to
sweep the classroom, so it was nearly four before I started for home. As
always, I walked the single-lane road toward town, passing the Bonachek farm
about halfway. Though underfoot the black earth was frozen hard as tarmac, I
was looking for signs of spring, counting the weeks until the end of the school
term.

My feet were
cold inside my new Sears and Roebuck boots and I was mentally drafting a
blistering letter to the company. The catalogue copy had promised me boots that
would withstand the coldest weather, so, as an act of faith in Sears, I had
invested a good chunk of my slim savings for the luxury of warm feet. Perhaps
the copywriter in a Chicago office could not imagine ground as cold as this
road.

I watched for
Janos’s mother as I approached her farm. For three days running, I had seen
Mrs. Bonachek working in the fields as I walked to school in the morning, and
as I walked back to town in the dusky afternoon. There was no way to avoid her.
The distance between the school and the Bonachek farm was uninterrupted by hill
or wall or stand of trees.

Mrs. Bonachek
would rarely glance up as I passed. Unlike the other parents, she never greeted
me, never asked how her boys were doing in school, never suggested I let them
out earlier for farm chores. She knew little English, but neither did many of
the other parents, or my own.

She was an
enigma. Formless, colorless, Mrs. Bonachek seemed no more than a piece of the
landscape as she spread seed grain onto the plowed ground from a big pouch in
her apron. Wearing felt boots, she walked slowly along the straight furrows,
her thin arm moving in a sweep as regular as any motor-powered machine.

Hers was an odd
display of initiative, I thought. No one else was out in the fields yet. It
seemed to me she risked losing her seed to mildew or to a last spring freeze by
planting so early. Something else bothered me more. While I was a dairyman’s
daughter and knew little about growing wheat, I knew what was expected of farm
children. There were six in my family, my five brothers and myself. My mother
never went to the barns alone when there was a child at hand: Mrs. Bonachek had
nine sons. Why, I wondered, was she working in the fields all alone?

On the afternoon
of the fourth day, as had become my habit, I began looking for Mrs. Bonachek as
soon as I locked the schoolhouse door. When I couldn’t find her, I felt a pang
of guilty relief that I wouldn’t have to see her that afternoon, call out a
greeting that I knew she wouldn’t return.

So I walked more
boldly, dressing down Sears in language I could never put on paper, enjoying
the anarchy of my phrases even as I counted the blue crocus along the road.

Just as I came
abreast of the row of stones that served to define the beginning of the
Bonachek driveway, I saw her. She sat on the ground between the road and the
small house, head bowed, arms folded across her chest. Her faded calico apron,
its big seed pocket looking flat and empty, was spread on the ground beside
her. She could have been sleeping, she was so still. I thought she might be
sick, and would have gone to her, but she turned her head toward me, saw me,
and shifted around until her back was toward me.

I didn’t stop.
The road curved and after a while I couldn’t see her without turning right
around. I did look back once and saw Mrs. Bonachek upright again. She had left
her apron on the ground, a faded red bundle at the end of a furrow. She
gathered up the skirt of her dress, filled it with seed grain, and continued
her work. So primitive, I thought. How was it possible she had spawned the
bright light that was Janos?

I found Martha
in an extravagant mood when I reached home. The weather was frigid, but she,
too, had seen the crocus. She announced that we would hold a tea to welcome
spring. We would put on the tea frocks from her trunk and invite in some ladies
from town. It would be a lark, she said, a coming out. I could invite anyone I
wanted.

I still had Mrs.
Bonachek on my mind. I couldn’t help picturing her rising from her squat in the
muddy fields to come sit on Martha’s brocade sofa, so I said I would invite her
first. The idea made us laugh until I had hiccups. I said the woman had no
daughters and probably needed some lively female company.

Martha went to
the piano and banged out something suitable for a melodrama. I got a pan of hot
water and soaked my cold feet while we talked about spring and the prospect of
being warm again, truly warm, in all parts at once. I wondered what magazine
ladies did at teas.

We were still
planning little sandwiches and petit fours and onions cut into daisies when the
doctor came in for supper. There were snowflakes on his beard and I saw snow falling
outside, a lacy white curtain over the evening sky. When Martha looked away
from the door, I saw tears in her eyes.

“You’re late,”
Martha said to the doctor, managing a smile. “Out delivering Mrs. Bonachek?”

“No such luck.”
The doctor seemed grim. “I wish that just once the woman would call me in time.
She delivered herself again. The baby died, low body temperature I suspect. A
little girl. A pretty, perfect little girl.”

I was stunned
but I managed to blurt, “But she was working in the fields just this afternoon.”

Martha and the
doctor exchanged a glance that reminded me how much I still had to learn. Then
the doctor launched into a speech about some people not having sense enough to
take to their beds and what sort of life could a baby born into such
circumstances expect, anyway?

“The poor dear,”
Martha said when he had run down. “She finally has a little girl to keep her
company and it dies.” She grabbed me by the arm. “We must go offer our
consolation.”

We put on our
boots and coats and waited for the doctor to get his ancient Ford back out of
the shed. It made a terrible racket, about which Martha complained gently, but
there wasn’t enough snow for the cutter. We were both disappointed—the cutter
gave an occasion a certain weight.

“Say your piece
then leave,” the doctor warned as we rattled over the rutted road. “These are
private people. They may not understand your intentions.”

He didn’t
understand that Martha and I were suffering a bit of guilt from the fun we had
had at poor Mrs. Bonachek’s expense. And we were bored. Barn sour, my mother
would say. Tired of being cooped up all winter and in desperate need of some
diversion.

We stormed the
Bonacheks’ tiny clapboard house, our offers of consolation translated by a
grim-faced Janos. Martha was effusive. A baby girl should have a proper
send-off, she said. There needed to be both a coffin and a dress. When was the
funeral?

Mrs. Bonachek
looked from me to Martha, a glaze over her mud-colored eyes. Janos shrugged his
skinny shoulders. There was no money for funerals, he said. When a baby died,
you called in the doctor for a death certificate, then the county came for the
remains. That was all.