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Authors: Marie Bostwick

BOOK: Fields Of Gold
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Slim stood, silent and unmoved as I spoke, the same maddeningly blank expression on his face. I couldn't help myself. I shouted at him. He had to acknowledge me. He had to hear me. “Thousands of them, Slim! Whole villages! Don't you wonder where they went?”
The door opened, and Mr. Hodges, who had been standing guard outside, peered in and glared at me.
“Do you need anything in here, Colonel?”
Slim shook his head. “No, Ben,” he said gruffly. “Thank you. I'll be out in a minute.” The door closed again, and he turned to me and frowned. “For God's sake, Evangeline! Lower your voice. You're not being reasonable. I'm sure your friend repeats all sorts of third-hand stories in his letters, but I doubt there is more than a grain of truth to it. Of course there are terrible things happening to Jews, terrible, but it's nothing as bad as you say. The German people couldn't be willing to engage in such barbarity.”
“Would they be willing to look aside while someone else did it for them?” I asked archly, wanting to wound him with doubt and, if only for a moment, pierce the wall of self-righteous certainty that he wore like a coat of armor. But it was an impossible task. My questions ricocheted unanswered off him and bounced back to me, echoing starkly through the room, leaving me as bewildered as ever.
“I can see there is no point in discussing this further,” he said stiffly and picked his hat up off the desk, preparing to leave. The interview was over. “You're obviously not willing to listen to reason and are taking this all too personally.”
“You're right,” I answered more softly. “I do take it personally. I've got reason to. It could just as well be me, you know.
“How would I fare in Germany, Slim? Where does Hitler stand on the question of cripples? Would someone as twisted as me qualify for membership in the Master Race? Or would I be loaded into a boxcar, too? What about Morgan? Of course, he is
your
son, so his lineage is impeccable, at least on his father's side. Do you think that would be reason enough to overlook his unfortunate maternal heritage?” My voice dripped with sarcasm, and I knew I was being cruel, but I couldn't stop myself.
“On the other hand, he might never have been born in the first place. That's what they do with the genetically undesirable in Germany today. They take them to the hospital against their will and perform operations so they can't reproduce and pollute the populace.”
“Stop it, Evangeline!” he barked, the impenetrable mask finally pierced. He was furious, and I was glad. I wanted us to share one honest emotion, even if it was only anger. “They don't do any such thing,” he hissed defensively. “All this emotional drivel obscures the truth! You're not looking at the facts.”
I cut off his argument with an emphatic shake of my head. “The Slim Lindbergh I know never used to be bothered by the facts; he worked on instinct. If you'd looked at the facts you'd never have landed in Paris.”
“You're wrong,” he said. “I made that flight because I did the calculations and they worked. The facts supported it. It was science. Just like what you're talking about—excuse me, what you're dramatizing—is a science. It's known as eugenics.”
“Yes, I know all about it,” I countered and snorted. “Even in Dillon we still hear about a few things. That Dr. Carrel, the French researcher you worked with on the artificial heart pump, is a big proponent of eugenics.”
Slim's eyebrows lifted slightly, and he seemed taken aback, surprised, I suppose, that I followed his activities so closely. “
Voluntary
eugenics,” he said more calmly. “It is a simple fact that if you can control reproduction, making sure that only the strongest bloodlines are joined, you can create a people who are physically superior, more intelligent, and unplagued by feeblemindedness or criminal tendencies. What is so awful about that?” he asked simply, seeming certain I would agree with his position once he laid it out so logically.
“A tidy argument, but it seems that in Germany they are having trouble finding enough volunteers.” Slim's brow creased into a frown again at my words. “Slim,” I continued, “who is going to willingly chop down their own family tree? Who do you suppose would despise themselves so much?”
“Anyone with any sense,” he retorted incredulously. “Wouldn't the world be a better place if children weren't born disabled or mentally slow? If you could have planned it that way, Evangeline, wouldn't you prefer to have been born with two straight limbs?”
I stared at him, shocked to realize that the man I'd lived my entire life for knew so little about me. His eyes were the same grey-blue, his skin as tanned and healthy as it had always been, if slightly more lined near his eyes. He looked as he always had, and yet the man I had known was dead inside. I had been worshiping a ghost.
The realization so stupefied me that it was impossible to speak. He mistook my silence for assent. “You see, Evangeline”—he took a step closer and spoke softly, almost enticingly—“you've got to look at all the facts. You've been oversimplifying things.”
“No.” I shook my head and whispered, “No, Slim, it's just the opposite. I've overcomplicated things, and for a long time. For months—no, make that years—I've been trying to piece together who you are instead of asking the one question that matters, though I didn't realize it until just now.” I took a deep breath and plunged ahead.
“If you were to meet me today, would you still want me?” I locked eyes with him, ready to see him full-faced and unfiltered. “Would you turn off your mind and listen only to your heart, lay down next to me on the new wheat, and forget yourself inside me?”
The air was dead between us, the silence long and eloquent.
He couldn't deny the accusation in my eyes, and his gaze shifted uncomfortably away from mine. “I'm not that optimistic anymore, Eva. I'm not that careless. I can't afford to be. Be honest; neither can you.”
I grabbed my coat and threw it over my arm, my emotions so thick and foggy I forgot about the package lying underneath. “
My
name is Evangeline,” I whispered, blinking back tears. “I don't know who you are. Maybe I never did.” I walked to the door and closed it behind me.
Chapter 19
R
uby was a caterpillar puffing sagely on a hookah, smoking and listening as we sat on the porch waiting for the kitchen floor to dry. A bowl half full of unshelled peas we were supposedly cleaning for supper sat forgotten between us. The floor had actually been dry for some time, but we paid no mind. Supper would be late. After keeping everything bottled up inside for three days, I was finally ready to talk. Ruby listened without moving a muscle.
“It was awful,” I said softly, looking down and watching my bare left hand. “I was in such a hurry to get out of town I didn't even realize I'd left the quilt behind until a good hour after the train pulled out of the depot. Who knows,” I said with a shrug, “maybe he never even saw it. Maybe it's still there. Maybe someone else found it and took it home.” The idea of abandoning my best work in an empty office for the janitor to find was distressing, but I couldn't help but wonder what would happen if Slim found the package himself and opened it, fingered the stitching curiously, trying to decipher the message I'd left behind. Did he know enough of me to read that private code, the one I'd meant for us to share?
“Well, whoever has it is sure lucky,” Ruby said, taking another pull from what was left of her cigarette and exhaling thoughtfully. “It was beautiful work, Eva. Your best ever.”
I didn't argue. Ruby was right. She had watched me work on the quilt in the weeks before I boarded the train to Des Moines. It was exquisite. All the colors of the prairie were in it, the colors you never know are there until you fly high over the uneven ground and see how everything works together so richly, a palette that exists beyond your imagination yet somehow, when you see it laid out below you, seems like an integral part of your instinct and memory. That quilt was my masterpiece—the landscape, the sky, perfectly real but better than reality. Up close the quilt was lovely, but it wasn't until you stepped back that it truly took your breath away. The colors blended and blurred into a vision mysteriously made more focused and honest by the clarity of distance.
Over the years, all my quilts had aimed for that tender impression more true than a photograph. I had finally captured it. A silvery wingtip cut across the quilt's upper corner at an acrobatic angle and seemed to glint in the bright sunlight while the white fringe of the flyer's scarf fluttered on a breeze of minuscule silver stitches. Beyond that the sky sang in a hundred brilliant gradations from diamond white to the color of a jay's cap until it melted into the dark, waiting earth and the outline of roofs and trees below, where a woman and boy stood in silhouette, tiny and patient, five hundred feet below, faces upturned and hopeful.
Ruby had gasped when she'd seen it. “Oh, Eva! It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen! You're an artist, Eva. There's no other word for it.”
I had brushed aside her praise as extravagant, but I was proud of my work. After so many years, so many quilts that were merely pretty, my diverse collection of threads and scraps finally said what I could never patch together in words. Running my hand over the quilted surface had felt like touching flight itself. When I'd wrapped it for the trip to Des Moines it had made my heart smile to think of Slim opening the gift, touching the work of my hands and understanding all the things that were too hard for me to say.
“So stupid,” I berated myself, “so incredibly stupid of me to leave it behind. He'll have thought I was ... I don't know, asking for something. That's how it will look to him, and that's not what I meant. I always wanted to be the one person who never asked him for anything.”
Ruby raised her eyebrows and, with her cigarette butt still wedged between the fingers of her left hand, folded her arms across her chest in a pose of utter disdain. “Well, pardon me for saying so, but that's about the dumbest thing I ever heard. Really, Eva,” she scoffed, “who do you think you are? Some kind of marble statue? You're a flesh and blood woman and you have a right ...” She growled in exasperation. “Good Lord, Eva, you have an obligation to expect something, just the tiniest crumb of recognition from the father of your child!”
Ruby took a last puff, reached for the ashtray with unusual vehemence, and blew out a final, irritable column of smoke. “So, now that it's all over, do you wish you'd stayed home?”
I chewed on the question for a moment, letting my legs dangle over the edge of the porch and swinging them in small orderly circles while I sorted out my feelings. “No,” I said finally. “I'm glad I went. Maybe I should have done it differently, or sooner, but in the end I had to find out the truth.”
“Well, then, that's that.” Ruby smacked her palm against the sagging porch smartly, announcing a change of subject. “Now what are you going to do?”
“About what?”
“Your life, you goose!” She groaned impatiently. “Eva, you can really be hard work sometimes. What's going to be different now that you've finally exorcised that ghost from your life?”
I knew she wanted me to say I was going to put on a new dress and knock on the door of the parsonage and tell Paul that I was finally over Slim, but I couldn't. I picked up the bowl of peas and started shelling them distractedly. Nothing was as simple as Ruby made it sound. Though I'd never told her what happened between me and Paul, I knew she'd noticed how things had changed between us. Paul never came by the house anymore, not even to see Mama.
Even if I did decide to invite Paul back into my life, it seemed I'd waited too long. The word around Dillon was that he'd been seen walking with Jolene Bergen after services. I'd heard Mrs. Dwyer share the news with Mrs. Linden as she cut and wrapped six yards of hideous moss-colored chintz intended as new dresses for the Linden girls, a matched set of pale, washed-out looking six-year-old twins nearly as ugly as the yardage their mother was buying.
Mrs. Dwyer, like everyone else in town, knew Paul used to come by our house pretty frequently. Though she never said so to my face (Mrs. Dwyer never said anything to me if she didn't have to), I knew she disapproved of the pastor keeping company with a woman of such questionable reputation. She leaned over the counter toward Mrs. Linden and hissed the news of Paul's outings with Jolene in a stage whisper that made certain I wouldn't miss a word as I stood near the wall, fingering a piece of machine-made lace. It infuriated me, hearing her toss Paul's name around like that, lobbing her gossip archly in my direction and hoping to wound me with it, but I didn't lift an eyebrow. I would have died before giving her the satisfaction of eliciting a reaction. Besides, I told myself, what right did I have to be jealous of anything Paul did. He was free to walk with anyone he liked, even the horse-faced Jolene. After all, I was the one who had pushed him away.
Ruby leaned over and bumped my shoulder with her own, knocking me out of my reverie. “Eva, when are you going to quit wasting time? He's not interested in Jolene Bergen, if that's what you're thinking.”
“It's no concern of mine who he's interested in,” I shot back, shelling peas more vigorously, nearly throwing them into the bowl.
Inexplicably, Ruby burst into laughter.
“What's so funny?”
“You are! You get any more jealous and you're going to bruise those peas.” She laughed at her own joke. “Eva, I thought you never paid attention to gossip? Well, the old bats in town have gotten it wrong this time. Jolene and Paul have been seen together quite a bit lately, but there is nothing juicy going on. In three weeks' time, Jolene is going to have a big white wedding and become Mrs. Elmer Olinger. She been talking to Paul because she wanted him to officiate.”
“Bud Olinger and Jolene?” I gasped in disbelief. “He must be twice her age!”
“More than that,” Ruby reported gleefully. “He's sixty-three, same age as my dad. But, I guess he's still, well ... let's just say he's as much of a man as he ever was.” Ruby winked slyly.
Her expression was so knowing and comical that I couldn't help but laugh. “How come you know so much? Ruby, you are making this up. You should be ashamed,” I scolded her halfheartedly.
Her eyes widened, and she held up her right hand Boy Scout fashion. “I swear it's true. Clara Johnson is remaking Mrs. Bergen's old wedding dress to fit Jolene. She's putting lots and lots of tiny tucks in front so nobody will notice the little surprise underneath the lace.”
“Oh, now you're just being mean,” I scoffed, returning my attention to the unshelled peas. “If she was really going to have a baby, why would she want to attract attention to the fact with a fancy wedding?”
“I believe it is known as a diversion.” Again Ruby winked knowingly, reaching into the bowl to snatch a handful of peas and pop them into her mouth before I could slap her hand. “Maybe they think a big ceremony will distract everyone. Besides, Mrs. Bergen has always counted on her baby having a beautiful white wedding with flowers and cake and everything. Something she can show off about for years to come.” I still had my doubts about the whole thing, but Ruby seemed sure of her facts.
“Clara told me that Jolene told her they are going on a long honeymoon tour all over the country,” Ruby added through a mouthful of raw peas. “They'll drive off in a cloud of rice, and in a few months' time Bud and his bride will motor back into Dillon with a trunk full of souvenirs and a precious bundle that looks real big and healthy for a seven-month baby.”
“Ruby, you're terrible.” I grinned despite myself. “That's an awful story to tell.”
“What's so awful about it?” Ruby retorted. “Jolene will end up with a baby and, before too many years go by, all the money Bud's been hoarding by living cheap as a bachelor farmer. Bud will get a young wife and a reputation as a rogue that will win him the jealous respect of every man in town. On top of that, I think they really care for each other. Seems like a nice arrangement to me.”
“I can't decide if you are being romantic or practical,” I said.
“It's a good balance,” she answered pointedly. “You should try it sometime.”
 
Jolene and Bud were married on a Saturday in late September. Practically the whole town came to watch. By Dillon standards, where weddings were generally buttoned up in five minutes without benefit of bridesmaids or organ accompaniment, and the bride usually spent the morning after the wedding night frying eggs for the groom's breakfast, it was a really elegant affair. The invitations were printed on white paper so thick it seemed more like shirt cardboard than stationery. I couldn't help but be impressed. Practically the whole town was invited. However, Mama refused to go. She said she couldn't imagine what Bud was thinking and that it was bad enough, a man his age marrying a little snit young enough to be his daughter, but having the nerve to dress up in a suit and invite half the town to eat cake and watch while he made a fool of himself was beyond her understanding.
“I'd just as soon get an invitation to see him and Jolene parade down Main Street buck naked. Anyway, I never liked the Bergens much. They're a snooty bunch. Always thought they were better than everybody else, and this proves it. I suppose you're going to go, Eva?”
“Well, it would be rude not to have at least one of us go, don't you think?” Mama grunted disapprovingly but didn't disagree with me.
Mama was right about people not liking the Bergens. They owned the hardware and feed store in town, which meant they were better off than most, and Mr. Bergen was always happy to share exactly how much better off that might be. Mrs. Bergen was the kind who was always pushing herself into some committee where she wasn't wanted to begin with and then lobbying to get herself elected chair. I had been five years ahead of Jolene in school, but that didn't stop her from once lobbing a green apple at my head so hard it nearly knocked me unconscious. All the Bergen kids were mean like that.
However, none of that stopped folks less hypocritical than Mama from showing up to see the spectacle. People who wouldn't have invited a Bergen onto the front porch for a glass of tea if it had been two hundred degrees in the shade dressed up and brought presents to the church because they'd never seen a fancy wedding, except at the picture show, and didn't know when they'd get another chance.
Despite what I'd said, good manners and curiosity weren't the only reasons I wanted to go. Paul would be there, and I wanted to see him. Ruby said she couldn't see any good reason why I didn't fall in love with him, and sometimes I thought she must be right, but it was too soon. I was not ready to love anyone, though I missed Paul's friendship very much. Maybe meeting up with him on a fine day, a happy wedding day where we could talk about the weather and the bride's dress, would give us a way to begin talking again without being too serious. Maybe we could pick up where we left off without needing to discuss painful things. It seemed worth a try.
As it turned out, Ruby had a cold the day of the wedding and couldn't come, but I put her name on the card of the gift along with mine and promised to tell her about every detail of the ceremony. There hadn't been much time, but I had run up a quilt on the machine in Jolene's wedding colors, peach and green. It was nice, but for sheer spite I made it a crib size, just to hint to Jolene that she wasn't fooling anybody. Considering my own past, I suppose I was the last one who could throw stones, but I'd never completely forgiven her for the apple-throwing incident. Besides, as I sat in the third pew of the church and studied the bride's middle under the folds of delicate white lace, it seemed to me that Jolene would be needing that baby quilt in only five months, not six like Ruby had calculated.

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