The Fall of Alice K. (8 page)

When the electricity came back on at 2:00 a.m., it took only the sudden hum of the electric clock to startle her awake. The lights in the cattle and hoglots were back on too—big fluorescent banners that made the whole world outside look as if it should be awake—or at least be on guard. Everything was silver and luminous and resembled neither winter nor summer. She walked around the upstairs and looked out the windows in all directions. The ground had a sandpapery texture, with earth showing through the glowing ice pebbles. The dark lawn was decorated with a million dull lights. Some hailstones had formed elongated mounds along the buildings in the shape of windrows and had the color of the corrugated metal storage bins.

She put her face to the screen in her bedroom window. The air was cool and quiet. She stared at the icy pebbles for a long time. The sight was storybook beautiful: fairy dust, fairy godmother sparkles. Wisps of steam rose up—like afterthoughts, or a ghostly ascension. Like the cloud that hung over the Israelites to guide them as they made their way to the Promised Land. She was with Noah on the ark, and the dove had returned with a leaf in its beak, promising a new beginning. She thought of her mother's fear of the millennium and wondered if this might be a foretaste of what it would mean for the millennium to come and go: destruction followed by the promise of a new world.

9

If Alice thought for a moment that the misty cloud had been a message from heaven that a new and better day was dawning, that hope was erased by the revealing light of the next morning. Hail insurance adjusters in four-by-fours and minivans cruised the sticky gravel roads before seven, stopping every quarter mile to measure the damage.

No insurance adjuster stopped by the Krayenbraak farm.

“Dad? Why aren't they stopping here? Our corn looks worse than anybody's.”

He shook his head.

“ What?”

“No crop insurance this year. Couldn't afford it.”

She stood next to her father and pulled on her boots in unison with him. They walked out into the muddy fields together, shoulder to shoulder, two stalky figures approaching the wounded cornfield. The battered ears of corn drooped from the naked stalks. When her father squeezed one in his large hand, milk from the kernels oozed through his fingers.

“This corn is too damaged to mature,” he said. His demeanor was flat and emotionless. It may have been resolute acceptance of what God had given them. The gift of trial. God was seeing if her father could be a Job. He nodded deliberately. “We can harvest it all for silage,” he said. “That will at least be something.”

Alice looked at the pathetic field of battered corn. Her father's solution would not be that easy. Too much rain had come with the hail, and dark puddles of water glowed between the shattered rows of corn. The dark puddles looked like blood. Which made Alice think of sacrifice. Useless bloodshed of the innocent. Even if the Almighty wasn't thinking of their well-being, why wouldn't He think of the innocent corn, those
gorgeous fields that one week ago were an endless celebration of green leaves? Didn't those thousands of stalks declare His glory? Couldn't He have looked down and said, “They are good,” and spared them? Alice turned toward her father where he stood majestic and calm. He looked better than the corn. How could anyone accept anything this terrible, just look at it, sigh, and go on? Whatever faith her father had, Alice knew she did not have it. Not yet, anyhow.

The first and only relief of the morning came when Alice went to the cattle feedlot to discover that the steers were unblemished by the hail. They must have found shelter, but they also must have known something was wrong because they took only a couple of nibbles and backed away. It might have been an air pressure thing that made their stomachs feel full. She didn't know. Maybe they needed time to recover the way she did.

In the house, her mother looked shell shocked. Alice tried to impose the image she had of her mother when she had thought of her as a hardened guardian angel, but this was the real thing. Her actual mother looked as if she was “letting herself go,” a favorite expression of people from Dutch Center applied to those who were on the skids for one reason or another. Seeing her drooping appearance reminded Alice that nothing looks sadder than a sagging tall woman. She wore the same clothes that she had on the night before, and she had let her hair hang in clumps over her ears and neck. Fists of hair against her narrow face. She still moved like a robot, but she moved more heavily, like a robot with low batteries. Her dark mood made its way into her cooking. She must have been preparing food for the rest of the day so that she wouldn't have to think about cooking again. She was boiling beans, boiling potatoes, boiling cabbage—three pans on the stove at one time.

“Soup,” she said when she saw Alice watching her. “We'll be eating lots of soup.”

Alice left her alone to do whatever she had to do. She was trying to boil something out of herself. She thought the bubbles on the surfaces of the boiling pots would release her troubles into the air.

When she finished her boiling of vegetables, she brought another pan of water to a boil and dumped in four small packets of instant oatmeal. This was breakfast. Alice wanted to ask her which recipe book she was using, but didn't.

“Merciful Father, we come unto thee with thankful hearts, thanking thee for the abundance thou hast bestowed upon us . . . ,” her father prayed.

“Dad,” Alice said when he finished, “I'm sorry, but what was that all about? Abundance? You thought, like, maybe God would find that funny?”

“Don't talk like that,” said her mother. “If you're going to open your mouth, open it to eat.”

Her mother was reprimanding her because commenting on a person's communication with God was sacrilegious. You didn't stick your hand into that fire. You didn't comment on somebody's prayer—unless it was the prayer of somebody with a false religion because they were reaching out to a figment of their imaginations.

Alice's father stared—no, he glowered at her. “As long as we have lips to offer thanks, we will offer thanks.”

Alice could feel Aldah absorbing the tension at the table.

“It's all right,” said Alice. “Eat, Aldah. Just eat.”

Without warning her mother made a bold announcement: “We need to have Aldah go live at Children's Care.”

“What?” Alice's response was quick as an “ouch.”

“We decided it was best,” said her father.

“We?”

“Your mother and I.”

Alice leveled her eyes at her mother. “Your mother and I?”

“Your father and I,” said her mother.

“The two of you decided this little life-changing event? This little ‘Let's break up the family, no questions asked' event?”

Alice pushed her plate away. Her urge was to behave like her mother and bolt from the unpleasant scene, but that would only have left this ridiculous idea unchallenged. “Oh, who cares what Alice thinks about this little decision to shove a family member out the door so we don't have to look at her anymore. Just get rid of her. Vamoose. Is that what you decided? Like what kind of ice cream to buy for dessert or something?”

“As if you didn't know it was coming,” said her mother.

“It's a decision that parents have to make, not children,” said her father.

Alice stared at her mother, not her father. It had to have been her
mother who came up with the idea to dump Aldah. Her mother could get cold and calculating when she wanted to. She had a way of making ideas that were not good ideas sound as if they were. She had worked her father over—and he had caved. If a stare of disdain had any power at all, it would have leveled her mother on the spot.

“It was a hard decision,” said her father. “We've been thinking about it for a long time.”

“Thinking and
talking
about it,” said Alice. “Is that right?
Talking
about it?” She kept her eyes leveled at her mother.

“Yes,” said her mother. “Talking about it.”

“I didn't hear any talking,” said Alice. “Where was I when all of this
talking
was going on? What am I, something you can just ignore and
talk
around? Pretend I don't exist, just shove under the rug and ignore? Like a mouse turd?”

“That kind of talk has to stop,” said her father.

“It will be for the best,” said her mother.

“That's stupid! An institution won't help her! Look what she's learned from me. You think you can just dump her out of our lives? Export her? Just like that? And the special-ed teachers said she was improving.”

“That's not what the scores say,” said her mother.

Alice argued, railed, screamed, accused, and finally pleaded.

“I'll come home earlier after school,” she said. “I'll spend more time with her after supper. I'll talk to the special-ed teachers about what we can do at home.”

Her parents were a stubborn unit. They had clearly planned to let her rant and not budge. Alice was a debater, and both of her parents knew better than to try taking her on with reason and evidence. They just took her on with their mantra: “We've thought about this for a long time, and we believe it is best for everyone.” They were even ready on the money issue: evidently, total financial disclosure cleared the way for state aid.

Her calm father was a fully converted accomplice. Aldah would be spending one more week living at home and going to her special-ed classes during the day. After that, she would leave their house and become a full-time resident at Children's Care, fifteen miles away in Groningen City. Her visits home and their visits to Children's Care would be limited. Her sister institutionalized! It was bizarre! It was wrong!

Her mother waited until she could see that Alice felt defeated. Then she gave the final push: “You shouldn't be so possessive of your sister.”

Her mother knew how to drop the last straw, but Alice didn't collapse. She walked away and went to bed without speaking.

When Alice came down for breakfast the next morning, her parents were not yet in the kitchen, but there sat Aldah, alone, her hands folded on the oak table. This was not like her to be up without someone waking her, the little sound sleeper, and Alice worried that Aldah might have understood the Children's Care talk a little too well and was so upset by it that she couldn't sleep.

Aldah had chosen to sit in Alice's chair and at her place at the table, but she did not have any food in front of her. She was barefoot and in her underwear but was wearing one of Alice's long-sleeved blue work shirts, which hung down onto the bulge of her stomach. She was humming to herself while staring at one of the framed pictures on the kitchen wall, a mountain scene with a waterfall and deer drinking from a stream. Aldah could dream of being somewhere other than Dutch Center too.

Her sister sitting by herself humming at the kitchen table. It was a lovely thing to see. This was not the image and these were not the sounds of a troubled child who was afraid to go off to an institution.

Alice stood still and listened, trying to hear what song Aldah might be humming, but she was humming a medley of melodies. “Jesus Loves Me” elided with “Three Blind Mice” elided with “Away in a Manger,” and each stanza, if she was dividing them into stanzas, ended with the final notes of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.”

Aldah hadn't brushed her hair, and strands swirled in every direction, but she had taken the time to put on her glasses. Her humming continued, almost gleefully. Aldah had found a freedom to live happily in a little fantasy life, free from the other members of her family and even free from the television set. There was a beauty and independence here that an institution would destroy.

Alice did not want to disturb Aldah's sweet contentment, but she couldn't resist moving closer. Aldah turned and looked up at Alice and smiled. Alice put her hands on her sister's shoulders and said, “Keep humming, my angel. It's very pretty.”

Aldah did keep humming, louder than before, and when she got to “Old MacDonald,” Alice sang along with her sister's humming: “Ee-aye-ee-aye-oh!”

Aldah giggled. “McDonald's,” she said and giggled again.

“Yes, my angel. McDonald's.”

10

Harvesting the battered corn could not happen until after several days of warm and sunny weather. At first, the shattered leaves looked like green tinsel, but warm weather made the frayed leaves curl and deaden into the familiar beige of what might have been ripe corn. The yellow-green husks turned color too, and the pulpy kernels oozed through the husks to turn the color of dried pus. A tornado would have been kinder. At least it would have picked up what it destroyed and taken it out of their sight. The corn leaves were like flesh that had been lashed until the skin split and dangled in strips, while the slender cornstalks stood like poles to which the tortured leaves and ears had been bound. The fields looked like they were infected. They looked like they had leprosy.

When the big equipment finally rumbled through the fields, disappointment carved its way onto her father's face. They had silage all right, but Alice could see that too much moisture had been lost. They heaped the silage into huge mounds, but it was flaky and it didn't have that pungent vinegar smell. It probably had little more feed value than straw.

For Alice, driving off for the first day of school at Midwest Christian felt like driving off to a much-needed vacation. Already the depleting life on the farm was fading and the delights of advanced placement classes awaited her. She felt as if she were dressed in new expensive clothing, though she wasn't.