Plains Song (5 page)

Had Cora ever doubted that the nightmare she had survived would result in a child? The logic of it was clear and not to be questioned. The gift of life was holy, and one paid for it dearly. The drama of creation, as she now understood it, a coming together of unearthly forces, was not unlike the brute and blind disorder of her unthinkable experience. So it was
meant to be, and so she had found it. Toward Emerson she felt no personal anger, admitting to the necessity of an accomplice. Only in this wise could the mortal body bring forth new life.

The pastor in Battle Creek, learning of her condition, referred to her discomfort as
wages.
She pondered this, but did not fully understand it. Stretched on her back, she watched the mound of her body swell to conceal the iron frame at the foot of the bed. In the hollow at her side Emerson slept soundly, and she was grateful for his indifference. Orion was always up before her to fetch the basket of cobs, build a fire, and fill the air with the astringent smell of coal oil. The whoosh and crackle of the flames, the sound of water dipped from the pail to splash in the wash pan, began a day that Emerson would end by winding the alarm clock on the range hood, the alarm set for five. That it seldom rang did not arouse his comment. It was part of the clock, and required winding, to ensure that the sun would rise in the morning. The first cackling of her pullets, before the first light of dawn, always found Cora awake.

It seemed ordained to her, rather than by chance, as did the sensible progress of the seasons, that as she grew larger and slower, so did the days grow shorter and the work lessen, accommodating itself to her situation. At prescribed periods, on the doctor's recommendation, she got off her feet. Her long, tapering hands, one with the blue-scarred knuckle, rested on her swollen body as if to calm it, or respond to an expected signal. Appraising her wide hips, the doctor
assured her that childbirth would give her little trouble. How could he have known that she found that prediction disappointing? Had she endured so much for a birth of little moment? From day to day, however, being with child gave her the satisfaction of work soon to be completed, a harvest to which she could look forward. One day differed so little from another only Sundays held her attention. She liked the prayer and the worship less than she did the singing of the hymns. Although Emerson had observed the Baptist sabbath in Ohio, he had been reared as Methodist, in Zanesville, but no church of that denomination was nearer than Nehigh, an hour's ride in the buggy. Cora had been raised a Unitarian, but she was not a stickler for denominations. She would go to the service closest by, if hymns were sung. She was amazed and troubled to learn, however, that Catholics had established themselves in the county, although owing their allegiance to neither God nor country, but to the Pope. She would have thought about it if more urgent matters had not been on her mind.

Just before Christmas, during their first intense cold spell, Cora suffered from deep drowsiness, with bad headaches which she assumed to be part of her wages, but Dr. Geltmayer threw open the kitchen door to flood the house with icy blasts of air. If she was ill, he said, it was because she lacked air to breathe. The house with its closed windows, its burning range, lacked oxygen. To explain, Dr. Geltmayer lit a stub of candle and covered it with one of Cora's jelly glasses. They were silent as they watched the flame shrink,
then sputter out. Emerson's astonishment was boundless. To believe it, he had to see it done over, examining the glass and lighting the candle with his own match. After that occasion he would say to Cora, “The air cold enough for you to breathe it?” Nothing else he had heard, read, or seen brought him so close to a smile.

The fact was, however, that Cora felt so much better she knew she had been short of air for some time. Too much of it, perhaps, hastened to bring on her labor pains. Orion walked the horse and buggy three miles to the farm of Otto Kahler, whose wife was a midwife, and by the time they had returned, Cora was stretched on the rack, as if meant to be broken. Although urged to cry out by Mrs. Kahler, Cora made no sound. Unable to bear the silence, Orion left the house and found Emerson in the storm cave, sorting the sprouting potatoes. The air in the cave was moist and almost warm, fragrant with the smell of the lantern. When he returned to the house the child was howling, but the woman on the bed appeared to be dead. It clarified Orion's first impression that she was a woman of remarkable appearance. She was not dead, but in a place so like it no one but herself might have drawn the distinction. She had lost so much blood that Mrs. Kahler marveled how a body so thin had managed to contain it. From where had it all come? How could it be replaced? Just a few days before, Orion had remarked the fever-like pricks of color in her English complexion, but now her face in the lamplight was like wet plaster. He wondered if any person should come
back from where she had been. He was sent out to fetch Emerson, so that the father might see the mother and child together, both of them alive. When shown the wrinkled, howling infant, he commented that she squawked pretty good for a girl.

The little tyke, as Emerson described her, was heavier than most boys Mrs. Kahler had delivered. Given the bottle, she stopped her squalling, like a good child. The strain of the birth had changed Cora's color, and hollowed her cheeks as if teeth were missing. She looked more like Abe Lincoln to Orion than Emerson's wife. What a strange sight it was to see her with the child. Her unbraided hair hung in lank, oily strands, her scalp showing bone white where the hair parted. However strange she looked, she proved to be of one mind about the infant's name. It would be Beulah Madge, the Beulah after the mother of Emerson and Orion, the Madge after the mother of Cora's father. It had been her name that Cora heard the most often as a symbol of womanly attainments. It was to her that Cora owed her high coloring, if not her temperament.

Emerson's comment was that with a name like that a girl would not find it hard to frighten off the boys. A moon-faced child, with light-brown hair that grew forward and down from the crown's bald spot, she had Emerson's small pale eyes, his chubby paw-like hands. Her complexion was that of a smooth Plymouth Rock egg. But if there was so little to remind one of Cora, was that cause for complaint? In line with the facts as
seen by Orion, or the few people he spoke to, the girls would do better to take after the father, and the sons, if any, after the mother. In such strange ways, surely, the Lord went about his mysterious work.

Along with the father's moon face, and his comforting figure, Beulah Madge inherited his constitution. Nothing fazed Emerson. Only lack of nourishment disturbed the child. Most infants deprived of their mother's milk were predictably wayward and choleric, subject to rashes and digestive disorders, with a corresponding sourness of breath, temperament, and outlook on life. Not Beulah Madge. The child cried so seldom Cora wondered if a faculty might be missing. In this she differed from Emerson, who took its equable nature for granted. It played with his paw-like calloused hand. When bounced on his knee it hiccuped and giggled. On Cora's insistence, however, it was denied the pleasure of sucking or chewing on his overall buttons. In the taking of food, in the soiling of diapers, she was methodical and tireless. In a wedge-shaped box made from a feed trough, she would lie gurgling and content to stare at the shadows moving on the ceiling. Each time the ashes were shaken, the air in the kitchen danced with dust motes. Cora worried that such air might be too thick to breathe, but not for Beulah Madge. As the cold tapered off, and the windows were opened, letting in the bird songs and the cackle of the hens, Beulah Madge was referred to as Madge. Perhaps Beulah seemed a large label on such a small package. Madge was what her father called her, words of one syllable coming natural to
him, this one escaping his mouth with no visible parting of his teeth or loss of tobacco juice. It was not Cora's nature to handle or fondle a child if it would sit by itself. The bald spot on Madge's crown troubled her, but she was reassured that it was temporary, as was her craving for feathers when Cora plucked a chicken, and turned to see the child with a mouthful, like one of the cats. The lightness and flatness of her own body pleased Cora, but she still found it a strain to lift the child to her hip or hold her for burping. Orion assumed this chore, patting her to the tune of nursery songs that irritated Emerson. If it was his intent to yahoo and yodel, would he get on with the building of his own house? The long wintering together, in the unfinished house, had aggravated the way the brothers rubbed one another, Orion leaving the house after breakfast to not return until Emerson had eaten. Cora kept his food in the range warmer, but he would bolt it in silence, then leave the house. Where did he go? On the moonlit nights he walked in the fields with his gun. The sound of it firing exasperated Emerson, certain he would kill himself or somebody more useful. Orion set his traps on the banks of the Elkhorn, where he trapped skunks, musk-rats, and rabbits. The skinned bodies of the creatures repelled Cora, and she could seldom bring herself to eat the flesh. Ducks she felt to be different; she heard them honking at night, and welcomed the long-necked, almost legless creatures with their still unruffled feathers concealing their dark, shot-pitted flesh. Orion liked the bird roasted, but Emerson complained
that swallowed lead pellets remained in the stomach, or worse yet, got into the veins and made these bumps and lumps.

In March the ground was firm enough to move the kitchen range from the temporary house to the new one, the draft up the new chimney so strong it would suck the flame from a wad of corn husks. A porch had been planned for the front of the house, where they might sit on summer evenings, free of the heat off the kitchen, but for the time being the wood was used to construct a platform porch at the back, low to the ground but running the width of the house. It would be deep enough to take the washing machine, with its tubs and pails, and a line to hang laundry in rainy weather. The floor was tilted to drain wash spill and drippings, and the one low step to the yard was no higher than a child could take, when it had to, which might be soon. Inside the house only the living room was plastered, the others ribbed with laths like a corn-crib, looking more like a building that was coming down than one going up. The stairs to the bedrooms, however, were heated like a warming oven by the chimney, so that Cora leaned on it for warmth as she went up and down. Furniture was lacking, and colorful wallpaper, but lace curtains screened the light at two windows, with green blinds at the front on rollers. Who was to look in at them but her chickens? Emerson asked. Two large crates of pullets, all of them Plymouth Rocks with the exception of two confused Rhode Island Red roosters, sat for almost a week at the station in Battle Creek before Emerson got the word to
come and get them. For two or three days they cackled all day and half the night. It had been Cora's intention to fence them in (the chickens were her problem, not Emerson's), but they scratched up food for themselves running loose, and she liked the way, hearing her in the morning, they would come clucking to gather at the porch screen.

Cora had never been much of a rocker, the creak and motion of the chair disturbing the quiet cherished by her father, but rocking proved to be a comfort those moments she had to herself. Her arms crossed on her front, since the chair was armless, she rocked with both feet on the floor, lifting her heels on the backswing. Orion had brought back from Columbus a small Axminster rug which she was at pains not to walk or rock on. The intricate pattern, in harmonious colors, provided the background for her thoughts. The glare and shimmer at the windows gave Cora headaches, but Emerson seemed to welcome the light in his face, a chair drawn up to the window while he sat shelling popcorn. Holding an ear of the corn in his injured hand, he would husk off the kernels with a cob. Whatever he did, shelling corn, husking peas, or sorting potatoes, some of it made its way to his mouth. In the evening, on the chair with springs, turned so the lamplight glowed behind him, he patiently read the operating instructions of his latest piece of machinery. After a period of concentration, he would say, “Who they expect to read print as fine as that?” and pass it on to Orion. It was left to Cora, after the brothers had haggled, to fill out the order blanks in the mail order
catalogues and calculate the shipping charges. Neither brother had gone to school far enough for fractions, or what to do with the decimal point in multiplication. On the mailing envelope Cora's Spencerian hand was fine as the signatures seen on labels. Emerson had not known his wife was so accomplished when he married her.

As smart as she was, Emerson felt it necessary to read aloud to her from
Capper's Weekly,
his lips puckered to hold in his chew of tobacco. Politics interested Emerson, but he understood its complexities were beyond the grasp of women. On those points where he differed with Orion, or Senator Capper, Emerson would fold the paper and refuse to read further. He did not argue. In another man this might imply he was thinking, but in Emerson it meant the issue was settled. His gaze averted, he would use a kitchen match to clean the wax from his ears.

A bounty had been placed on wolves in the county, although neither Emerson nor Orion had seen one. Orion shot rabbits, but to tell the truth, it almost sickened Cora to clean and cook them. Stripped of its pelt, the taut body glistened. The small legs put her in mind of fingers. On her plate all she could think of was the pleading eyes. Somehow this did not trouble her about chickens, which she took the pains to behead herself, sometimes chasing the headless flapping bird around the chopping block. Orion plucked the bird for her, and the feathers were saved for a sleeping crib for Madge. They had pork from a neighbor, a pig raiser, who exchanged the cuts for eggs and butter,
Cora's way with the cream, after the separation, proving to be sweeter than customary. Orion would clean the rim of the crock with his finger, then lick it off.