The Fall of Alice K. (44 page)

Her father's face was a quiet sheet of acceptance. Still, Alice knew his assumptions: he assumed she would be going to live in the home for unwed mothers at the beginning of the new year.

Like everyone else from Dutch Center, he heard about the sandpit scene. It was all over the news and it rippled through the grapevine. But he didn't talk to Alice about it. Some part of him was letting go, and he demonstrated no need to control anything.

His only comfort was his office, and Alice did snoop around in it when he walked around the farmyard slowly to check on what Alice had done with the animals. He didn't have quick-money brochures or tables of profit and loss on his desk. He had history books, not only the old
Atlas
but also particular ones about the Dutch in America. Her mother had gone to the library for him and had come back with a stack of books that Lydia's mother had selected and which he now had laid out in his study. He also had pages and pages of material that he had run off from his Internet searches. Alice was not sure what exactly he was looking for—some solace in the past? Some echo of Dutch character that might sustain him in the present? He was taking notes and highlighting whole passages. He reminded her of herself.

“Dad?” she said as she approached. She did not want to catch him off guard in the middle of his private escape. He had the
Atlas
open again, but right now he seemed less interested in the grim legacy of the faces than in the optimistic advertisements that appeared every few pages—implement dealers, furniture merchants, grocers, druggists, carpenters, and an auctioneer who advertised “Public Sales Cried in Dutch or American.” Most of the advertisements were for horses and livestock: Percheron Horses, Clydesdale Horses, Hamiltonian Horses, Shorthorn Cattle, Hereford Cattle, Aberdeen Angus Cattle, Polled Durham Cattle, Holstein-Friesian Cattle, Poland China Swine, Duroc-Jersey Swine, Chester White Swine, Berkshire Swine, Silver-Laced Wyandottes and Silver-Spangled Hamburg Fowls, Barred Plymouth Rock Chickens, Brown Leghorn Chickens, White Pekin Ducks.

The pictures of the feeder cattle showed box-shaped animals on short legs and with low full briskets. The pigs, too, were bulky and rectangular and appeared to have more fat than pork. All the meat animals looked so different from the long-legged lean creatures that they were feeding.

Alice sat next to her father and looked at page after page of advertisements with him. The names attached to the advertisements were only family names. There did not seem to be one corporation name in the entire county.

“Things sure aren't what they used to be,” said her father.

“And the family portrait section,” said Alice, “those days didn't look so hot either.”

“No, they probably weren't.”

Alice felt like a first grader sitting down with her teacher for story time. Her feelings were not quite that simple. She felt despair about the Krayenbraak farm and yet free from it. She felt emptied of grief and yet sad. Was this the freedom one feels when hitting rock-bottom or when one has been totally transformed by love? Nickson's love? God's love? Maybe even her stern father's love?

“Dad,” she said, “tell me about your work at the dairy. Did you have time to think or anything like that?”

“All I did when I was at the dairy was think,” he said. “Putting on eight hundred teat cups a night is a little bit like cultivating corn back in the days when they had checked corn. You know, every corn plant perfectly spaced from the next one?—blip blip blip, those plants would click by all day as you cultivated a big field. Thousands and thousands of times a day. Hypnotic. Makes you daydream. Makes you think.”

“I thought your job was supervisory.”

A rare little grin crept across his face. “Right.” He sat smiling and shaking his head. “What a laugh. After I spent a few hours putting on teat cups I'd go to the boss and report how the Mexicans were doing—like whether they were putting on the teat cups too soon after the disinfectant spray had been put on.”

He made exact gestures with his hands. He was trying to give a clear mental picture.

“You see,” he said, “one person walked ahead with the disinfectant spray, but timing was crucial. The disinfectant was supposed to be on
thirty seconds. If the milker was too fast or the disinfectant man too slow, the timing got off. My job was to notice all these things. They called me their time-and-motion-study man. But I did all the other work too. I was supposed to be the brain and the grunt. I was a grunt more of the time than I was a brain.”

“Did you go the whole night without anybody to talk to ?”

“Not much talking ,” he said. “The Mexicans talked to each other and I talked to the boss about how the operation was going.”

“You always were good with details.”

He pinched his chin, then looked back at her. “Putting on teat cups wipes the mind clean. Like a blank slate. That blank slate of my mind,” he said. “I kept waiting for God to write something on it.”

She looked at this quiet, resolved man sitting there. The system, the world, the weather, the prices, his own wife, his pregnant daughter—everything had defeated him. He was losing the family farm, but he didn't look beaten. He really didn't.

“Dad,” she said, “did I make you have a heart attack?”

Without hesitating, he shook his head. “No,” he said. “God's message in this is to me, not to you.”

“You mean that?”

“I mean that,” he said. “What about you? Are you praying? Are you ready for the future?”

“I'm working on it,” she said. “When you're down here by yourself, what are you really looking for?”

He told her. For the next hour he told her.

Alice's father liked to talk about “our people” as if they were still some kind of distinct group. On the surface, they weren't. The Dutch descendants might have kept a trace of the stone-facedness that she saw in the portraits of the early settlers, but in most settings they blended in. Until that telltale saying grace in public places.

Her father's interest in history was a mystery, but she was trying to understand it. For a while, she thought he believed that connecting to their roots would somehow bring them out of the financial disaster that had come upon them. She was wrong. That was not it at all.

When her father looked at the history of the Dutch in Iowa, he saw the
history of humble country people seeking lives of piety in a sinful world that forever tempted God's people with the frivolous lures of “
spelen, zuiperijen en zwelgerijen
”—gambling, boozing, and sensual indulgence.

He seemed to relish those Dutch words, though Alice did not know how good his pronunciation was. Alice knew that what her father was reading was the real stuff. This was the thinking that made its way down through the generations. Phony and godless optimism of the Enlightenment? No wonder such indulgent attitudes toward the self led to
spelen, zuiperijen en zwelgerijen!
Still, her father could talk like a scholar, like a learned philosopher or historian. Alice knew how rare he was. He was an old breed: the thinking, learned farmer. But right then, it occurred to Alice that her father's study of history was his way of accepting the worst.

One thing that attracted Alice to the Vangs was that they didn't seem to have the same sense of sin that the people of her tradition had. Mai could date wildly but clearly took all the precautions against sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy and gave no indication that she thought she was doing anything wrong. Alice still puzzled over how easily she could move beyond the scene at Perfect Pizza, and to move on without guilt for slapping those guys and without fear of their retaliation. Nickson didn't show much remorse about his drug life either. He simply accepted what he had done as something he had to do at the moment. If either of them ever experienced guilt, it was more over whether they measured up to the needs of their family than to the demands of God. It seemed to Alice that they were more afraid of offending their ancestors than of offending The Almighty. She sometimes both admired and resented Mai and Nickson's freedom from guilt. They just didn't have it. Things happened and they moved on.

Nickson and Mai didn't worry about money either, maybe because they never knew what it would be like to lose what the Krayenbraaks were losing. Alice tried to imagine explaining to Nickson what this loss meant. If the past followed the Vangs through ancient wars with China, through war with the Communists in Laos, through the hard life in refugee camps, something of the distant past was living in Alice's family too. Perhaps her father's interest in history was his way of finding out who
they once were so that he would find even one reason to have hope in the present.

Some of the Krayenbraak troubles must have looked silly to the Vangs. The Hmong had known starvation hundreds of times. They had had to move to survive hundreds of times. The idea of feeling that everything was at stake just because of losing the family farm must have seemed to them self-indulgent. Who did the Krayenbraaks think they were—so privileged that ownership of land would forever be a given? Even if they lost the farm, Alice couldn't imagine that they would starve—or even have to go on food stamps. This wasn't the Great Depression, and they would not be that destitute. The very worst thing that could happen would be that they'd have to live on her mother's hoarded supply of Spam and pork and beans for a year and continue to bathe in cold water.

Alice never thought they were people in a high place. They were just an average farm family with the average conveniences of a nice house with all the amenities, a pickup, a car, and all the farm equipment necessary for working the fields and feeding the cattle and pigs. Nothing out of the ordinary. But she also knew that to her father, losing the farm wasn't just losing the land and equipment. Losing his money wasn't losing money. To him, the loss was bigger and deeper than that. Material loss was no more significant than the loss of his hair, just a superficial thing. Nor was it anything so simple as pride. He, like thousands of other farmers, had lost face years ago when it was becoming clear that sooner or later corporations, not individuals, would own most of the land in Iowa, even Groningen County. To her father, losing the farm was losing everything that history bequeathed to a person. It was losing the gift of the past. Memories of his father and grandfather were painful to him, as if he felt they were looking down from heaven with disappointed eyes. He had failed to uphold their legacy. So much had been given to him, and now he had not earned the gifts of the past. For a poor man to fail was one thing. For a person who had been so blessed to fail was quite another. She was confident that she understood her father and what he was going through.

“We'll never lose everything,” she said to him.

“No, no,” he said, “of course not.” He held up the old
Atlas.
“This is what we are losing,” he said. “All of it.”

“But you don't seem troubled. You seem so accepting of things.”

“I'm trying,” he said.

Through the entire conversation, he had not said one word about her pregnancy and what he wanted her to do next.

44

Lydia was scheduled to give a chapel speech. Alice couldn't imagine why Lydia had been asked, though it occurred to her that it might have been Miss Den Harmsel's suggestion. Or it may have been the principal's way of warming Lydia up for giving the valedictorian address next spring. In some ways, it was a relief to think that Lydia might be the valedictorian: it would save Alice from the embarrassment of being denied the role because she had gotten pregnant. Alice still felt some jealousy: she could easily have been the one to give a chapel speech before news was out that she was pregnant.

Lydia was dressed in bright green and red Christmas colors as she walked up to the lectern. She looked brilliant. She looked beautiful. She smiled brightly as she adjusted the direction of the microphone. She looked as if she had practiced in front of an adoring mirror!

“This is a privilege” were her first words. “I am honored to share some thoughts with all of you this morning.”

Please, Lydia, Alice thought to herself. Don't give a political harangue.

Lydia had chosen two short Scriptural texts, Matthew 6, verse 24—“Ye cannot serve God and mammon”—and Proverbs 11, verse 28—“He that trusteth in his riches shall fall: but the righteous shall flourish as a branch.”

“The rich are inheriting the earth,” she began. “I apologize for sounding so political, but I have prayed about this. I believe we are at a crossroads in this country as the millennium is upon us, and I believe this is especially true for us at Midwest Christian and in the Dutch Center community. As some of you know, my parents were born in the Netherlands. Dutch was my first language. My mother's favorite expression is ‘
Hoge
bomen vangen veel wind
'—‘tall trees catch a lot of wind,' which in Proverbs reads, ‘Whoever trusts in his riches will fall.'

“My friends, I believe money and the use of money to control our minds is the biggest threat to the well-being of our country as we enter the twenty-first century.”

Lydia, you big hypocrite, Alice thought. Everybody here knows your parents are rich!

Lydia didn't stop. She went on to talk about corporate power and greed. She attacked Rush Limbaugh. Alice's last hope was that Lydia would not start naming politicians like Steve Forbes and George W. Bush. But she did—both of them. And not in a very respectful way. She called George Bush a bumbling rich boy who was born with a silver foot in his mouth. Alice could feel tension growing in the students around her. Lydia was building a wall of alienation around herself.