In Need of a Good Wife (33 page)

His mouth roved over her mouth until it felt raw. The wiry hairs of his beard prickled the skin around her lips, and Rowena felt tears spring to her eyes, moved her face to the side to suck in a breath. His hair was so soft beneath her fingertips, the salt scent of him so marvelous and real. Tomas ran his lips down her neck and over to her ear, taking the lobe into his mouth. He bit down on it, and a small whimper escaped her lips. He pushed her away, roughly, stood panting.

“I am hurting you?” he nearly snarled.

Her heart was bashing against her ribs like an animal in a cage. “Yes,” she said, then moved toward him again.

He held up his hand. “Why you are doing this?” he asked, then moved farther away from her, his back up against the wall in the small space, and gave her a desperate look. “Nothing good coming from this.”

She shook her head, angry now. She could be haughty, at least, if he tried to deny that he had wanted this too. “Oh, don’t behave as if you haven’t thought of it.”

Tomas hit the wall with his fist and the little house shuddered. “
Damn it.
I thinking about it all the time, Rowena.”

All at once she understood that it wasn’t about her. “You’re feeling badly about your wife,” she said stupidly.

He held up his palm again, looking away. “I betray her
never
, not once. I am faithful always.”

“Of course you were,” Rowena said, speaking more softly now.

The ferocity in his eyes was shifting into something tenderer, more afraid.

Rowena chose her words carefully. “But you were right in what you said to me the last time you were here. We can’t bring them back. Your wife is never coming back. My Richard is
never
coming back.” Though she was resigned to this, the words still wounded her. Tomas rubbed his face and sighed. “And time only stops for the dead.”

He looked at her for a long moment, the tension easing from his shoulders. She moved cautiously toward him again, and he pulled her, gently this time, to his mouth. He kissed her forehead, then her cheeks, then her chin. Their mouths moved together gingerly, as if they were sheltering their bruises.

In pursuing this, in allowing another man to touch her, she was casting Richard off forever. Her whole body ached as she felt him slip away. As Tomas pulled her dress away from her shoulders, she felt grim and sad but very much alive, aware of the breath coming in and out of her lungs, aware of her heels on the hard-packed ground. Like a soldier planting a flag on a hill, she was staking her claim in the world of the living.

They passed an hour in the chicken house. Now Rowena leaned back against the shelf she planned to line with hay for the chickens to make their nests. With the drought it almost wasn’t worth bringing them in now until the spring. The spring! It seemed so impossibly far away. How would she survive here until then? Tomas lay on the ground with his head in her lap. Rowena drew circles in his hair with her fingers.

“Rowena?”

“Hmm?” she said sleepily.

“When you marry Mr. Gibson, he agree to send money for your father, no?”

“That’s right,” Rowena said.

Tomas looked up at her through his pale lashes. “And how he is doing now, your father?”

Her eyes flicked away, up to the ceiling. “Oh, better than he has been in years.”

“And that is because …” Tomas whispered.

“He is dead,” she said flatly. “How did you know?”

“When telegram come in, I am there at depot. Stuart Moran is not most discreet man in Destination.”

Rowena sighed.

“So your thinking is you not tell Mr. Gibson about this? Keep taking his money?”

“I’m not going to talk about this with you.”

“You need to talk about it with someone. You not think he find out about your father?”

“The telegram listed him by name—it didn’t say he was my father. Could have been my uncle; could have been a neighbor.” Rowena rattled off this explanation, which she had prepared the day the telegram arrived, in case Daniel should confront her. It was the key to telling a convincing lie. Think of everything, anticipate it before it happens.

“But it is
not
. It is your father.”

Rowena shrugged.

“Ah, me,” Tomas said. He sat up, his legs crossed in front of him. “Let me ask you: Mr. Gibson, he treating you badly, ever?”

“No.”

“And you not angry with him about something?”

“No.”

Tomas waited for his words to have an impact but they did not seem to break through. “So
why
you are doing this to him?”

“I’m not doing anything
to
him. This has nothing to do with him.”

“But you take his money and lie about why.”

“I’m doing everything I told him I would do. I am cooking for the children, cleaning the house, hiring out the laundry, seeing about improvements—like this chicken house.”

Tomas gestured to Rowena’s dusty, rumpled skirt. “I not thinking
this
is what he have in mind.”

She blushed. “Of course not. But it’s none of his concern.”

“How long you plan to keep doing this?”

Rowena hadn’t let herself think more than a week or two ahead. “Until I have enough money to start over somewhere new without having to marry again, I suppose.”

“So you never wanting marry again? My meaning is, after Mr. Gibson?” Tomas looked away as he said this. “This is not real marriage.”

“It’s real enough for me. For now.” But of course, Rowena suddenly realized, the marriage was not real, not to God or Rowena or Daniel, and certainly not to the state of Nebraska. Daniel’s wife was still alive, still out in the world somewhere. Rowena and Daniel had no claim on each other.

“And you not wanting …”

“No. Never.” She knew what he was getting at, what he felt: that snap of recognition, his skin touching the skin of the person, maybe the only one in the whole world, who could truly see him. And because that person existed, the lead weight of loneliness in his lungs lifted for a time. And he could breathe.

She felt the same for him, of course, but she’d be damned if she would let him know.

“Well, then.” He paused, smart enough to know not to argue with her. “How much is enough, so that you not have to marry?”

“Quite a bit,” Rowena said. “It’s going to take a while.”

Tomas stood up and tucked his shirt back into his trousers. “This that you are doing is wrong. I not being part of it.”

Rowena gave him an unconcerned gaze. “You don’t know anything about it.”

Tomas groaned. “I not understand why, but for some reason I like you. Why you not willing to listen to me?”

“Because my financial situation does not concern you.”

“When wrong thing being done to you, Rowena, like your husband dying, you not fixing it by doing wrong thing to someone else. You not knowing this?” He looked beseechingly at her. She did know it, in theory, but she wasn’t sure whether she believed it to be true. After all, wasn’t this exactly what she was trying to do, to fix one wrong with another wrong, to even the score? If he only knew about everything else: the way she treated Daniel’s poor children, what she had done to Clara Bixby, all the money she had stolen from Manhattan City to here. The ability to keep those secrets, the ability to resist succumbing to the weak need to confess, felt like all Rowena had left.

When she didn’t answer, he sighed. “Time for me to go.” He screwed his bowler hat on over his hair. “Probably, you not seeing me again, Rowena. I leave Destination soon. Go somewhere they are having jobs for men like me.”

She did not react to this. “I know, Tomas. You will do very well there.”

They stared at each other in silence.

Just then they heard the
clunk, clunk, clunk
of something against the wall. Rowena sniffed the air for the scent of rain but there was none and no one had seen a cloud in the sky for weeks. They peeked out the door.

One by one, two-inch-long grasshoppers sailed against the side of the chicken house and fell to the ground, gathering and milling in the dirt. Soon there were dozens, crawling over each other’s backs.

The sunlight’s glare seemed to dim and Rowena looked up at the sky. A cloud of grasshoppers moved across the sun, an ominous gray swarm.

Elsa stayed at Leo’s bedside all through the first night and the next day. He had moments of lucidity but then sank into sickness again, uncomfortable, thrashing, fitful. It was sunstroke, severe, and he could recover from it, but only if they could find a way to get him to eat something and drink water.

At dawn on the third day she took the big tin pitcher out to the well. As she stepped out the kitchen door, she glanced down, as was her habit, at the vegetable garden. In the last few weeks the plants had wilted some, but enough green remained to reassure her that the root vegetables, at least, were coming along in the still-damp soil six inches deep.

But now, the little plot was absolutely bare. No evidence remained that a single thing had ever grown there, only dimesized holes in the caked soil. Elsa stooped down and dug her fingers into one of them, pulling out an aborted onion. The top third was missing its brown paper and the outer layers of white flesh. It was not so much severed as
gnawed
away.

“What in the world?” she whispered.

Then she heard the roaring vibration, like the sound of rushing water, and glanced up. The sound came from a haze in the sky, growing nearer, and then dropping down en masse. One member of the horde broke away and flew toward her, nearly as big as a dragonfly. It landed near the onion hole and rested for a moment, its wings spread and glittering in the sun, then flew off to join the rest, dropping down into the barley field and across the dry pasture like a brown, crawling carpet.

On the other side of the field, Nit came out of his house and looked wonderingly at the rows of barley, then Elsa, and started toward her. The whole prairie was full of the whirring sound of the grasshoppers’ wings.

Before they could eat the rest of her vegetables, Elsa dug up the remaining onions and carried them to the kitchen. She cleaned and sliced them thin enough to see the light through. On the board she mixed flour and water with a bit of oil, kneading it until the dough was smooth, then pressed it flat on the baking stone. She melted butter in the frying pan and cooked the onions on a very low fire until they were like caramels. When they were nearly done, she chopped two slices of bacon as thick as her finger and added them to the pan. She spread the butter and onions and bacon on the dough, then slid it into the brick oven. The sweet-salt smell filled the entire house. When it cooled a bit, she would spread the tangy quark cheese on top. She knew she should be outside helping Nit, but Elsa was determined to get Mr. Schreier out of bed, and this tart could make a dead man’s mouth water. Her
Tante
always claimed it had made at least three men fall in love with her.

Just then the shadow of the man appeared, hunched, in the kitchen doorway. “Is it time for dinner already?”

Elsa smiled to herself and said a silent thank you to Tante Gretchen, then brought the tart to the table and cut Mr. Schreier an enormous slice.

Later, after Mr. Schreier had gone back to bed with a full belly, Elsa joined Nit in the field to survey the damage. Within a few hours, the grasshoppers had destroyed at least half of the crop and they showed no signs of slowing their devastation. Elsa and Nit swung a pair of rakes through the rows to shake the insects from the stalks, then tried to rake them into large piles. The hoppers crawled over each others’ backs in a heap six inches deep. Nit tried setting one of the piles on fire but a couple of flaming hoppers took flight and spread the fire into the farthest row of dry barley. He and Elsa stamped the fire out quickly, the squashed hoppers forming a slime on the ground, before they burned the entire field and barn and house down. Elsa and Nit stared openmouthed at each other, at a loss for what to do to overpower them.

“Elsa!”

She recognized the squeaking cry as Ully came around the side of the house. The girl ran to her and hugged Elsa around her middle.

“Hi,
Spatzchen
,” Elsa said. She picked a few hoppers out of Ully’s hair. “Seems like a long time since we’ve seen each other.”

“Mrs. Gibson told me I wasn’t to come bothering you because she heard in town that Mr. Schreier is sick. Is it true?”

“Yes, my dear, it is,” Elsa said. “We are hoping he is on the mend.” She hesitated about inviting Ully in. The girl had never come around when Leo was inside the house.
He probably is
sleeping deeply
, Elsa thought.
If he wakes up and sees her, I’ll tell
him he’s dreaming.
She grinned at her friend. “Come on inside. I have something for you to eat.”

Nit told Leo about the seeming plague of hoppers and that persuaded him, finally, to stomach the water with honey that Elsa prepared for him each morning. Within a day, he was better. He was slow and irritable, but he had been slow and irritable before. He said nothing to Elsa about what he had asked her to do, to call him
Leo
and walk with him in the evenings. She wondered whether she had imagined the whole thing. She did take to calling him
Leo
in her head, but said nothing at all to him in person when she could help it, for fear of the shame of having misunderstood him.

Leo really didn’t believe them until he dressed for the first time in three days and went outside to see the destruction for himself. He confessed that in his fitful dreams he had thought they were under a hailstorm, but it was only the sound of the hoppers banging against the outside of the house. He had seen something like this once before, he told Elsa and Nit, about ten years back when he had first come to Destination with Birgit. But not nearly as bad as this and much later in the summer. What would they do if this went all through July? They would have to abandon the town, every single one of them. The place would be uninhabitable. If the trains couldn’t pass on the tracks, thick as they were with these roaming tormentors, then the town would be truly cut off from the basic supplies, from food. They would have to flee or starve.