Windfalls: A Novel (8 page)

She passed the Levitt elevator, which loomed like a lone wooden skyscraper above the empty railroad tracks, passed the Hopkins’s place and then the Joneses’, passed the grove of bull pines where she had once seen a fox. As she drove, memories moved through her, intense as the sour candies her grandpa used to bring from the Grange. She remembered perching with Sally on top of a load of grain while the farm truck raced down the road to the elevator, remembered how the hot wind had whipped their hair, how the dusty load had shimmered in the sun, how they’d chewed handfuls of wheat into a glutinous gum and gazed like sunburned princesses out across the golden land. She remembered picking roses with her grandmother and going hunting with her grandfather in his pickup. “Don’t look for deer,” he’d told her as he drove. “Look for where you can’t see field. Sometimes you have to try to find what’s missing before you can see what’s really there.”

The car began to labor up a hill, and she shifted into second. When she reached the crest, she eased back on the accelerator and paused to look down into the valley that held her grandparents’ house. Amid the golden fields, it sat in a tidy island of green yard, dwarfed by the spruce tree her grandfather planted the year the stock market crashed. Grandpa’s dead, she remembered, and the stab of pain that followed seemed nearly welcome for the way that—for a moment—it thrust all the other emptiness aside.

She descended into the valley, turned up the drive, parked in the wide shade of the spruce. The front door opened, and her grandmother stepped out onto the porch, one hand shading her eyes in a worried salute. She was wearing a housedress and an apron, opaque hose and solid black shoes. Anna saw how small she had become, how lined and strained and faded, and an odd flicker of anger seared her. For a moment she felt impatient with her grandmother because she had allowed herself to get so old.

“You’re here,” said her grandmother, coming down off the porch and holding out both her hands toward Anna. Her fingers were stained a deep maroon, and when Anna took her hands in her own, she was startled to feel how smooth they were, as if the lines and ridges of her fingertips and palms had been rubbed away.

“I didn’t expect you before suppertime,” her grandmother said apologetically. “I’m working on the beets.”

“The beets?” Anna asked, dropping the smooth, stained hands and reaching out to give her grandmother a careful hug. She felt her narrow shoulders and staunch spine beneath the fabrics of her apron, dress, and slip, smelled lavender and Ivory soap and the earthy scent of beets.

Her grandmother reached up to pat Anna’s shoulder as though she were a small girl or a good dog. “Irene Hodge brought by a bushel. I doubt I can eat that many, but I hate to let them go to waste. I’ll send some home with you,” she added brightly.

All that work for beets, Anna thought wearily. She said, “I don’t think I’ve ever canned beets.”

“No?” her grandmother asked, pulling back from the hug and peering into Anna’s face with a mixture of pleasure and consternation. “My.”

“But you can show me how,” Anna offered awkwardly.

“Surely,” her grandmother answered. “Though first,” she added warmly, “I want to hear everything about how you’ve been.”

It was the world’s most innocent question, but it caught Anna off guard. Hastily she tried to scrape together a response from the stock of answers she had used all summer. I’ve been fine, she thought, looking out across the empty acres of wheat. I’ve been just great. Everything’s going really well. But before she could say those words, other words escaped instead. “Don’t ask me that.”

Her grandmother shot a quick look in Anna’s direction, and Anna flinched and caught herself, appalled at the rawness in her voice, terrified at the thought of what might spill out next. “Please,” she added, casting a quick imploring glance in her grandmother’s direction.

The old woman’s face held an expression Anna had never noticed on it before—keen, unflinching, kind, and nearly shrewd. She studied Anna for a long moment, and then she nodded briskly as though she were making—or keeping—some kind of promise. Motioning toward the car, she asked, “Would you like to bring your things in now?” and the moment healed over itself so seamlessly that, except for the trembling of Anna’s hands as she lifted her suitcase from the trunk, it might never have happened.

That evening, after the mountain of beets had been boiled and peeled and sliced and salted and packed into jars, after the hot lids had been screwed down and the filled jars had been submerged in the great kettle of boiling water and then heaved up, dripping and steaming, and set on the counter to cool, after Anna and her grandmother had eaten pot roast and mashed potatoes and boiled green beans and sipped an inch or two of the sour chablis her grandmother kept in the refrigerator to serve to company, after the dishes had been washed and dried and replaced in the china cabinet and the floor had been swept and mopped and the leftovers wrapped and put away, they went outside to sit together on the porch and try to catch a wisp of evening breeze.

The sun had just set, and a last ruddy light filled the world, burnishing the fields and illuminating the roses that grew beside the porch railing, deepening the crimson Mr. Lincolns so that they looked nearly black and causing each of the Bridal Whites and the Summer Snows to glow like the core of a flame. But studying them from her seat on the top step, Anna felt only a dim nostalgia for how that light might once have stirred her.

From the kitchen came the faint ping that announced another lid had sealed.

“Nineteen,” her grandmother said, her voice almost smug. She sat in a white wicker armchair, a skein of pastel yellow yarn in her lap, her knitting needles flashing in the rosy light. “We accomplished a lot today.”

“Yes,” Anna murmured, gazing out across the quiet fields. The sound of knitting ceased, and Anna looked up. Her grandmother was counting stitches. Despite her dexterity with the needles, her fingers were bent, the knuckles thickened with arthritis. Anna remembered how smooth those hands had felt when she’d held them that afternoon, so smooth she wondered if her grandmother’s fingertips would even leave a print. It seemed as though her grandmother had shed her very identity in the anonymous, endless labor of housekeeping, and now, looking at her grandmother’s hands, she shuddered to think how small and sheltered her grandmother’s life had been. She thought, It’s no wonder we’ve got so little to say to each other.

“What are you knitting?” she asked, in penance for her thoughts.

“A sweater for Dylan,” her grandmother said, holding up her needles so that Anna could admire the sweater the size of a tea cozy that was skewered between them.

“It’s sweet,” Anna answered. “Sally will love it.”

Another silence draped them, broken only by the little tapping of needles. From the kitchen came the ping of a lid sealing.

“Twenty,” her grandmother counted.

Anna murmured a small assent. She wondered if it was too early to excuse herself and go to bed.

“I have a conceit about canning,” her grandmother said.

“A conceit?” Anna asked politely. “You mean you’re proud of it?”

“Well.” Her grandmother gave a quiet laugh. “I expect conceit’s an old-fashioned word. I mean a little idea—a fancy, you might say. It came to me years ago, when the boys were all still babies. I used to spend all of August in the kitchen back then. When I wasn’t cooking for the harvest crews, I was canning everything I could get my hands on. Seems like we needed every bean and berry to make it through the winter.”

The pale yarn danced and jerked briskly between her needle tips. “It came to me one day back then that what I was really doing was preserving light—the sun’s light, you know, caught in those vegetables and fruits—I was putting up light in those glass jars, saving sunlight down cellar until we needed it, in the dark of winter.” She cast a shy look at Anna. “I expect you’ll think that foolish,” she said.

“No,” Anna said, looking across the yard at the quiet fields and trying to keep the ache out of her voice. “I think it’s a nice idea—preserving light.”

Above them in the deepening sky the first stars were appearing. Anna felt the ache widening inside her, felt the gaping yearning returning.

“I was always so practical,” her grandmother said lightly. “It frightened me, when I first started thinking like that. Later I got used to it, I suppose.”

“Hmmm,” Anna answered, and then roused herself to ask, “What made you think that way? At first?”

There was a pause so long Anna thought her grandmother hadn’t heard. Then she said, “I lost a daughter.”

Lost? Anna thought, trying to make the words fit inside her head. A daughter? A sizzle of warning ran along her spine. She felt a moment’s disbelief, a refusal as if her grandmother were joking or even lying, or as if she’d somehow gotten the facts of her own life wrong. Anna darted a startled glance at her, but she appeared as serene as ever, looking quietly out toward the darkening garden. She said, “I doubt your father ever told you.”

“No,” Anna answered cautiously. “Dad never said a thing.”

Her grandmother nodded. “It was before he was born—or Charles or Henry, of course.” She was silent for a moment, and then she gave a gentle laugh. “I haven’t spoken of her for years—decades, maybe, by now.”

Anna thought, I cannot bear to hear this. “What happened?” she forced herself to ask.

“She died,” her grandmother answered, “being born.” She spoke so mildly she might have been talking about a recipe or the weather. “I carried her to term, but I lost her before she ever took a breath.”

Anna made a small involuntary moan, a little sound of pain and sympathy.

“It was a difficult birth,” her grandmother continued, the yarn still jigging between her needles. “A dry birth, was what they called it back then. It took so long to get her out, I’d nearly given up on living myself by the time she came. I used sometimes to wonder if that was what had killed her, me forgetting about her in all my pain.”

“Oh, no,” Anna answered ardently, reaching her hand toward her grandmother, although she sat too far away to touch her. “That couldn’t—”

“I know that now,” her grandmother said. “But then I wanted so much for there to be a reason. I needed some way to understand it, something to blame. Even if the blame was mine, it seemed easier to bear. It’s hardest, you know, just to let things be.”

Warm as the light from a candle flame, a glow was widening low in the sky behind the crest of the farthest hill. The moon, Anna thought, and beyond all expectation she felt an answering bloom of hope.

“Afterwards,” her grandmother went on, “everyone had an explanation for why I shouldn’t take it too hard. They said the Lord needed her in heaven, or that her heart was so weak she would only have suffered had she lived, or that it was a blessing I hadn’t had her longer and come to know her more and love her better before she left me. But I just wanted to hit them when they talked like that, all of them—the doctor and the preacher and even my own mother. I wanted to spit at them, and kick and scream. There was a wildness,” she said awkwardly, “I’d never known before. Sometimes that winter I wanted to tear off my apron and all my clothes and run into the fields and lie down in the snow and die. I had a longing to let the winter wheat sprout up through my ribs. I wanted to join her—my only daughter—in the dirt.”

All the crimson roses had vanished into the evening, although the white roses still remained, hovering like glowing ghost-flowers in the darkness.

“What was she like?” Anna asked, and then cringed, afraid she’d asked something wrong.

“She was the loveliest thing,” her grandmother answered promptly, her voice ringing as though she were reading from the Bible or telling a story she knew by heart. “Though I got only a glimpse of her, in the nurse’s arms. They said it would be too upsetting if I held her. But I never forgot how she looked. She was the prettiest of all my babies, the very prettiest one.”

The edge of moon rose above the horizon, spreading a wide nimbus of yellow light in the dark blue sky. “How did you stand it,” Anna asked softly, “losing her?”

So harshly it almost sounded like a rebuke, her grandmother answered, “I didn’t have a choice.”

“I—know,” Anna said. “I’m sorry.” She pressed her open hand against her stomach.

“No one has a choice,” her grandmother added gently. “You always think, ‘I couldn’t bear that,’ but when it happens, you see you have no option but to bear it.”

The moon broke free of the horizon, rose full and huge and golden into the clear night sky. Her grandmother spoke again. “You fold it back into your life, as best you can. I suppose a corner of my heart died when she did, and it never came back. But the rest of my heart compensated somehow, like the way they say a blind person’s other senses get more alert.

“It’s funny,” she went on. “The boys all outgrew me, moved on into their own lives. But she stayed with me, all these years. Of course I imagined a life for her, how old she’d be, what she’d be doing, the kind of woman she’d have become, but she never left me, never moved on.”

Gentle as a whisper Anna asked, “What was her name?”

“They buried her before I had a chance to name her. They said that was for the best, not to wait. But later I named her anyway, in my thoughts. I would have called her Lucy, had she lived. It’s queer,” she added softly. “But I only just now realized—I don’t believe I’ve ever told anyone that before.”