Vampires in the Lemon Grove (13 page)

“A grave,” says Peter, a joke I don’t like one bit. It’s our home, although it does look like a hiccup in the earth. The floor is sod, the roof is sod, hardened by the red Nebraska sun—if it ever rains again, water will sheet in on our heads for days. The mattress sits on a raised cage of wild plum poles. My mother covers the cookstove with her mother’s pilled linen tablecloth to keep the lizards and field mice and moles and rattlesnakes and yellow spiders from falling into our supper. (Although she threatens to pull the cloth if we get cheated out of another harvest, and let every plaguey creature into our soup: “The wheat’s not getting any taller, Jo, but our boys are. They need meat.”)

Pa and Peter and I dug out the room. Pa used the breaking plow to sculpt the sod into six-inch slabs of what folks here call Nebraska marble. He stacked these into our walls, arranging each third layer in a cross-grained pattern with the grass side down. In summer, this room can get as hot as the held breath of the world. We dug a sod stable for the team of horses, the hogs, and Louma, our heat-demented cow. She’s got the Hereford lightning up her red flanks—it looks like somebody nailed her with a bucket of scalding paint. She chews slop with a look of ancient shock, her vexed eyes staring out from a white face. In truth, her eyes look a little like Ma’s.

My horse is Nore, who I’ve been riding since she was a two-year-old filly. She’s jet-black and broody and doesn’t fit with my father’s team. Up on her back I’m taller than any man out here, taller than a pancake stack of Peters. I saddle Nore, explain the day to her, her ears flattening at the word
Inspector
.

Behind the stalls, my father is shaking my mother like a doll.

“He’s a rumor, huh? Then I’m going to shove the fellow’s arms through the coat sleeves of that rumor! He’s real, and so are we Zegners. By sunrise we’ll own our home, if you can muster faith. Faith the size of one—damn! One seed of some kind. It moves mountains. How’s that go, Vera, in the Bible? Apple? Pumpkin?”

“It’s a mustard seed, Jo. Yahweh is not baking any pies.” Ma’s voice is shaking now, too. “Miles is eleven years old,” she says slowly. “The Sticksels are a half day’s ride for you …”

Pa catches sight of me, and I duck his gaze. I hope he shakes the looniness right out of her. I’m ready to ride.

Ma never yells at me. But lately her voice is dreadful even when it’s cheerful, singing out of the well mouth of our house. Hoarse, so that it sounds as if the very sod is gargling sand. She’s not sick, or no sicker than anybody else—it’s the dust. I hate the strain in her voice as she tries to make a happy tune for me and my brother, when her yellowish eyes are sunk deep in her face and every long note she holds shoves her ribs through her dress. She hasn’t been fat for two years.

I was the last Zegner born in Pennsylvania. The three girls were born here, and buried in a little plot under the tufting gama grass, next to the sixty acres we have in wheat. Aside from salt thistle and the big sunflowers in July, nothing grows on top of the girls. Ma won’t allow it. She’s of the opinion that each of her daughters would have lived had we stayed in Blue Sink. Long-nosed and blue-eyed—“like you, Miles.” Tall and pin-thin, like the women in her family.

That’s how my sisters look to me, too. Glowing taller and taller. White legs twining moonward, like swords of wheat. They sprout after dark. Some nights the heat is suffocating and it wakes me. Through the hole in our kitchen where the Window will go I watch my mother kneeling in their field, weeding thistle. The three sisters sway behind her back. They stare at me with their hundred-year-old faces. They know they missed their chance to
be girls. The middle one smiles at me, and her white teeth outshine the harrow. She gives me a little wave. I wonder if she knows I’m her brother.

When red dawn comes Ma’s at the cookstove with her face to the leaping flame, and I’m afraid to ask her if I was dreaming.

I cannot tell Pa or Peter about the sisters, of course. And not Nore—she’s a horse, she spooks. Lately I won’t even pray on it, because what if God tells them up in heaven that I’m terrified to meet them? Sometimes I talk to the pig, who’ll be butchered anyhow come Christmas Eve.

“I’ll be fine, Ma.”

“He’ll be fine.”

“Jo!”

“Do you want me to send Peter, then?” Pa says coolly.

“Oh, Jo. He
can’t
. You know that.” Ma chews at her lip, Louma-like.

Something is going wrong with my brother. He’s not reliable. A few weeks ago, when the clouds dispersed again without releasing one drop of rain, he disappeared for three days; when he rode home his hands were wet. “Not my blood,” he reassured Pa. Ma sent me on the four-mile walk to the well to haul for a bath, even though our washing day wasn’t until the following Wednesday, and we boys go last—after a draw for drinking and cooking, after a draw for the garden.

Peter is sixteen, but that night he let Ma sponge the black blood off him like a child, and I almost cried like a kid myself when he splashed clean water in waves over the sides of the trough.

I am a little afraid of my brother.

“I’ll go, then.” Pa’s whole body draws back like a viper in its gold burnoose. I close my eyes and see the shadow of his secret self throbbing along the wall of our sod barn: his head rolling to its own music and sloshing with poisons. Even in the quiet I can hear him rattling.

“Jo.”

“No, sweetheart, you’re right. Pete can’t go, we can’t spare Miles—who does that leave? I go or we forfeit our chance. We don’t prove up. We don’t own the land where our girls are buried.”

Ma leaves to get the Window.

We nightly pray for everyone in Hox to prove up, the titles from the Land Office framed on their walls. The purple and scarlet tongue of my mother’s bookmark used to move around the Bible chapters with the weather, but for the past year and a half it’s been stuck on Psalm 68:9. On that page, says Ma, it rains reliably.

Through the empty socket in our sod, I can see her hunched over in the deepest shadows. Dust whirls around the floor in little twisters, scraping her ankles raw. She bends over the glass, and a rail of vertebrae jumps out. My mother is thirty-one years old, but the land out here paints old age onto her. All day she travels this room, sweeping a floor that is already dirt, scrubbing the dinner plates into white ovals, shaking out rugs. Ma is humming a stubborn song and won’t look up from the Window on her lap. She polishes the glass by licking the end of her braid into a fine point and whisking it over the surface, like a watercolorist. Now the Window is the only clean thing in our house. It’s the size of a hanging painting, with an inch border of stained glass. Two channeled lead strips run orange and jewel-blue light around it. But the inner panels are the most beautiful, I think: perfectly transparent.

Ma wraps it in some scatter rugs and penny burlap. “Good-bye, Miles,” she says simply.

We fix my cargo to the horse’s flank, half a dozen ropes raveling to one knot at the saddle horn. Pa hitches my leg at a painful angle, warns me not to put weight anywhere near the Window. Already I’m eager for the crystal risk of riding at a gallop. Then he gives me an envelope and kisses up to my ear like he does Ma’s.
“A little bribe,” he says. “Tell the Inspector there’s more waiting at the Zegner place.”

“Okay.” I frown. “Is there?”

Pa thumps Nore on the rump.

When we reach the fence line a very bad thought occurs to me: “Pa! What if they don’t give the Window back?” I call out. “The Sticksels—what if they try to keep it?”

“Then you’d better run fast, because those aren’t our neighbors. Those are monsters, pretending to be the Sticksels. But before you run, grab the Window.”

I might as well have asked him,
What if Ma leaves us? What if Peter never gets better?

I don’t look back as I glide Nore around the oak—the only tree for miles of prairie. The wind blows us forward, sends the last leaves raining around us and the October clouds flashing like horseshoes. I duck underneath the branches and touch the lowermost one for luck. When I turn to salute my father, I see that he and Ma are swaying together in the stunted wheat like a dance, his big hands tight around the spindle of her waist and her face buried in his neck, her black hair waterfalling across the caked grime on his shirt. It’s only later that I realize Ma was sobbing.

THE FIRST FAMILY
of landowners we met in Nebraska were the Henry Yotherses. Five years ago, a few weeks after our migration to the Hox River Settlement, we arrived at their July picnic “one hour shy of serendipity,” as Mrs. Yothers immediately announced—too late but only just to meet the Inspector. I was a pipsqueak then, and so I remember everything: the glowering sunset and an army of Turkey Red wheat mustered by the Yotherses to support their claim, the whaleback hump of the sod house rising above the grassy sea—and Mr. Henry Yothers himself, a new king in possession of his title.

“A proven man,” Pa whistled.

“Christ in heaven, love must glue you to him every fortnight,” Ma joked to Mrs. Yothers—but in a hushed voice, surrounded as they were by what seemed like thousands of Yothers children. Ten thousand tiny mouths feeding on that quarter section of land, and dressed for the occasion like midget undertakers, in black trousers and bowties.

“That Inspector shook each of my children’s hands,” boasted Henry Yothers. “Congratulated each one of them on being ‘landed gentry.’ He’s a curious fellow, Johannes. Lost an eye in the war. He wears a patch of dark green silk over the socket. It’s no coincidence, I’m sure, that he’s obsessed with the Glass Requirement.”

And then we got our first look at the Hox River Window: that magical glass fusing their inner room to the outside world, gracing their home with light. Back in Blue Sink there were thousands of windows, but we only looked
through
them, never
at
them. We gasped.

Remembering this, I feel queasy all over again. Something about the big grins on everybody’s faces, and all that pomp: the Inspector’s checklist, the ten-dollar filing fee, the U.S. president’s counterfeit autograph in an inky loop. Through the glass we watched Mrs. Yothers slide the title into its birch frame and dutifully applauded. The general mood confused me. We were going to slave and starve and wait five years to get a piece of paper so thin? Why? To prove what? Who cares what Washington, D.C., thinks?

“Congratulations!” my mother beamed at Mrs. Yothers, with a girlishness I’d never seen before, and then embarrassed us all by bursting into tears. “Oh, boys, they
proved
it to them.”

“To who?”

“Who? Everybody, Miles! The people back East, who said they’d never make it a year on the frontier. The men in Washington.
The Inspector will forward their papers on to the president himself. Now you come say a prayer with me—”

Back then, Ma never mentioned Pennsylvania except to say “good riddance.” We’d traveled west under juicy clouds that clustered like grapes. My sisters weren’t alive in her belly or dead under the thistle and sod. Our plow gleamed. Furniture from Blue Sink was still in boxes.

“Miles, if we’re to make this place our home, we need it official. Same as any claimant out here. You can’t understand that?”

With Pa out of earshot, I said, “No, ma’am. I really cannot.”

“The Yotherses survived the grasshoppers of 1868, got hailed out twice, burned corn for fuel. They took over from the Nune-makers. Did you know that, Miles? A bunch that fled. But the Henry Yothers family prevailed—they held on to their claim. Your heart’s so stingy you can’t celebrate that?”

But, Ma
, I wanted to say. Because I guessed that a few hours earlier, before the Inspection, the Yotherses’ farm had looked no different from the proven place we’d leave—with the same children running barefoot around their cave, and in the distance the same wheat blowing. And the whole scene sliding through that Window, as real or as unreal as it had ever been.

WHAT WE DIDN’T
know then, as we filed our own preempt in the white beehive of the Federal Land Office: the long droughts were coming. Since that July day, over half the Hox River homesteaders have forfeited their claims and left, dozens of families withdrawing back east. And the men and women who stayed, says Pa with teeth in his words, who sowed and abided, “We are the victors, Miles. Our roots reach deep. We Zegners were green when we came here, but now we’re dust brown, the color of Hox. Proving up means you stand your ground, you win your title—a
hundred and sixty acres go from public to private. Clear and free, you hold it. Nobody can ever run you off. It’s home.”

Over the years, my father’s reasoning has been whittled to its core, like everything else out here. At times he wanders around our homestead shouting at random intervals, “I know a hunger stronger than thirst!” His voice booms like thunder in my brain as we light out. Nore digs into the dry earth, happy to be running.

“Nore?” Like Pa, I whisper into the pink cone of her ear. “We’ll get the Inspector, but I’ll tell you a secret: I don’t understand why they need that piece of paper. This place has been home for years.”

AT FIRST
it is a fine morning. Nore strikes a square trot and I goose her to a canter. Pocket gophers and kangaroo rats scramble in front of our lunging shadow; the horned larks are singing in the grasses, plumping like vain old Minister Fudd back in Blue Sink. Soon nothing but crimson bluestem is blazing all around us. Coyotes go mousing in this meadow but today I count none. Twice I have seen eagles back here. Three miles of dead grass pass, tickling Nore’s hindquarters. Whenever she sneezes I let go of the reins and grab ahold of the Window’s wrought-iron frame, which feels as slender and bony as a deer’s leg through the burlap case. Pa could have a million sons and none would be a better steward.

We sink into the tallgrass, happy to get swallowed and escape the midday sun. But when we emerge the sky is seamless and black, and the last yellow stitching goes dark. Something is shifting, I think. We reach a timber belt of cottonwood and Siberian elms—species not uncommon to Nebraska, yet I’ve never seen examples of such overpowering heights. Atmospheric salts spill through the air as birds scatter in fantastic numbers before us. The
charge pucks the horse’s huge nostrils, causes her devil’s ears to cup around. A chill races down her bony shoulders and prickles up my neck. Between noon and one o’clock, the temperature must plummet some twenty degrees. A sound I barely recognize claps in the distance. “Oh, Nore,” I mumble into her ear, sick with hope. The black sky grows blacker still.