The Fall of Alice K. (28 page)

Little fears nipped at her as she did her chores. This was a dress rehearsal for tomorrow night when she would be seeing Nickson as soon as she was sure that her parents were asleep. What if something happened to her while she was doing chores? What if she sprained an ankle and wouldn't be able to drive off to see him? What if she smeared herself with so much hog manure that she wouldn't be able to wash the stench away? There was no wet chicken in any refugee camp that could smell as bad as Iowa hog manure.

Tonight was practice in how to do this right. Her plan was to be systematic about this chores enterprise. She'd have an efficiency formula. She'd make to-do lists for the first week and stick to a schedule. She'd take note of the tasks she had to do and think of them as station stops. She'd find the most efficient route. She could learn what it takes to fatten a bunch of hogs for market and to do it without exhausting herself. If only she had control of the market prices. Somebody somewhere probably did have control of the market prices, but that somebody somewhere also probably could have given two hoots for the Krayenbraak farm.

She'd still do her job, and she'd do it well—and she wouldn't leave a mess anywhere. Slovenliness was often an early sign of a farm that was going under—but untidiness was the first thing old-timers in the community noticed about anything. Tidiness, the pretense of cleanliness, she thought to herself. That she could do. As she worked, she knew she was imitating her father. Something about him said that if he just had all the pieces lined up, everything else would line up too. She was imitating him, as if she too believed that a neat framework could give meaning to it all. They were looking for order when the truth of the matter was everything was falling apart. Was it his faith that order would bring prosperity, an image of God's blessing? If this was faith, then faith was pretense in action.

If the hailstorm had broken the back of their faltering farm, and if it was now in its final stages before collapsing to its knees, Alice knew it was her father who would feel like the failure. Everything he did, he did with such deliberate certainty: he sat erect at the table, he enunciated with exaggerated clarity when he read the Bible and offered prayers at the table. He never spilled feed, and when he put a feed scoop away, he always brushed it clean and hung it on the same hook. So much control.
So much determination to keep things in order. He was wound so tight that if he ever did break, he would break like a twig overburdened with ice. Her mother was so bent already in her dark vision of the future that if total failure came to rest on the Krayenbraak farm operation, she probably would go on in a slightly more bent version of what she was already. As to herself, she didn't think the collapse of the farm would ruin her place in the world, except that she probably wouldn't be able to buy any new clothes. She'd probably be ashamed that they couldn't make it as a farm family, but she'd probably feel the greatest shame at seeing that her parents had failed.

The further she progressed with the evening chores the more she let go of the thoughts of her parents and the farm. When she looked at her hands as she worked, she thought of how thoroughly she would wash them before she saw Nickson tomorrow night. She wondered what Nickson would think of her flexing muscles as she lifted hay bales, one in each hand.

The more she thought of Nickson the happier she felt. She sang hymns to the hogs: “And the trumpet, the trumpet shall sound! And the dead shall be raised incorruptible!” she shouted to their indifferent slobbering snouts.

When she got to the steers, she playfully recited lines from
Hamlet
: “Number 77,” she said to the dangling ear tag of a big black, “What would you do if your ‘too too solid flesh would melt, fade and resolve into a dew'? And number 154, are you sure you want to crap right there next to the feed bunk? ‘Foul deeds will rise.'”

She felt giddy. She augered the useless hailstorm silage into the bunks, grabbed a handful of it, squeezed it, and brought it to her nose, then tossed it into the air and watched it drift down onto the steers' backs like huge green snowflakes. She turned to number 88 with a handful of the worthless silage and tossed it in front of his nose. “Sweets to the sweet,” she said.

The steers weren't as uniform as the Big Macs that would come out of them. They were a mixture of exotics—all sorts of colors. They came from ranches in South Dakota and Wyoming, and her father bought them in little bunches at sales barns where they had been shipped. Alice liked the Limousin breed. Her father had bought several, though few showed the
true golden-red colors of the purebreds. Most of these were tan, but they had the short head and wide forehead of the purebreds. Alice liked their spunk even more than their looks. “Back-kickers” her father liked to call them. They usually weren't aggressive, but they did not like sudden noises one bit. Alice felt like bringing out their wild spirits. When she had started up the augers, the Limousins twitched and lifted their heads like startled deer. When they were sure they were safe, they joined the other steers at the bunks. Alice sneaked around behind them, and as they were munching away, she reached over and gave one Limousin a quick tickle on its rump while saying, “Cootchie-cootchie-coo!”

He was a back-kicker, all right. His back heels flew level with her eyes and his brisket whacked against the feed bunk. “Humph,” he said, and spit out a mouthful of dry silage. She gave three more Limousins the same tickle on the rump and got more good kicking responses. When one of them backed out of his place at the bunk after he'd kicked, she knew this game might have consequences. He turned toward her like a bull and lowered his head.

“Not so fast,” she said, “no offense,” and backpedaled away as he watched her. Fear had led to anger in this one, but it only intensified the thrill for Alice. “Come on, come on,” she said, daring him to charge her. The Limousin looked at her warily. Alice didn't doubt for a second that she'd be able to get over the fence before he could get his thousand-pound body in gear. “Come on, come on,” she teased again, but the animal stared nervously and did not move.

While the steers were eating, Alice went into the empty barn. Checking the barn to make sure there weren't any sick steers inside and that all of the doors were secure was the last step in her evening chores. But no sooner had she stepped into the barn than a wave of nostalgia came over her. This was part of her world that Nickson had never known. She not only wished she could show it to him; she wished she could show it to him the way it was when she was a little girl. Back when they still had milk cows, the barn felt like the most wonderful place on earth, the safest and most comforting refuge a girl could ever hope to have. When she was eight and playing outside in the winter, sometimes her fingers and toes got so cold that being outside wasn't fun anymore. But she didn't like going to the house to warm up because as soon as she
stepped into the porch her mother would yell, “Take your boots off! I don't want all that snow melting on the rug!” Once Alice had her boots off, she wouldn't want the bother of putting them back on to go outside. As a little girl, she knew the barn was the one place where she could warm up without having to take her boots off.

If she had known Nickson when he was a little boy, she could have shown him the barn as she knew it as a little girl: the cows, chewing their cud and looking out with their mild dark eyes and spreading peacefulness around them. The swallows in their nests tucked against the beams overhead, the dark heads of the babies peering over the edge of the nest with their little yellow beaks open.

When her father sold the milk cows, all the stanchions that covered one half of the barn were removed. The small calf and pony pens that broke up the other side into cozy compartments were removed too. There were no longer any mangers. There was no alleyway. The whole ground floor was turned into one big open area that had no character at all, just a big space for fat steers to sleep and defecate. Who would want to come to a place like this to get away from anything? She stared at the open space of their barn with the steers starting to come in after feeding. If she ever did have a chance to show Nickson the barn, she would tell him how it once was.

She started back to the house, her stomach growling for the food that would be waiting for her. These free hours when the chores were finished stood before her like a wall of time. Her parents were indeed asleep when she came in to find the hotdish ready. She did her homework while she ate, and when she finished she quietly cleaned up the kitchen. Then she sat down at the table to face the wall of silence. The silence was like a presence, a thing alive that was closing in. She missed the sound of Aldah's eating and her enlarged eyes smiling through her thick glasses. She missed the sound of her father's voice saying grace. She even missed her mother's critical surveillance of everything that was happening. She missed the tension of the supper table. Without the tension of knowing that any moment her mother might launch an attack or that Aldah might tip her milk or cough after taking too large a bite—without something real around her to keep her on guard, her energy was being sucked from her. She could feel it go, bit by bit, starting in her head and working
its way down to her feet, and out into that vacuum, swallowed by silence. This was worse than the awful silence that followed the hailstorm. When she felt her neck sagging forward, she had an image of what she looked like. She took a deep breath and sat up. She was starting to look like her mother.

This was the greatest injustice of all. This curse of silence that her parents were subjecting her to. She could have made loud noises to wake them up, but waking them was the last thing she wanted to do. She moved quietly in the kitchen. Then she went outside and started the Taurus, which was quieter than the 150. She drove it to the end of the driveway with the lights off. Then she drove it back and parked it. She went into the living room and walked toward her parents' bedroom door to see if they had stirred. They hadn't.

Out of habit she walked over to Aldah's small bedroom, opened the door and turned on the light. She could smell her sister's presence, a pleasant and subtle smell, like clean flannel. She decided to leave her door open, not to prove to herself that Aldah was really gone but to allow whatever was left of Aldah's presence to come into the kitchen and keep her company. She would read down here tonight, with Aldah's bedroom door open.

Tomorrow night would be different. Tomorrow night she would close Aldah's bedroom door before quietly slipping outside and driving off to see Nickson.

29

The plan was to pick Nickson up at six o'clock and go for a ride. No big deal. Nothing that any normal parent would object to, even if they did know about it.

Alice finished her chores in half the time it had taken her the night before. She had an apple for supper, took the meatloaf out of the oven, and put it in a plastic container in case Nickson was hungry. It was only five o'clock and already she could hear the soft duet of her parents' breathing.

Whatever the midnight work schedule was doing to them, they weren't losing sleep over it.

She didn't take any risks about waking them: she worked quietly to get ready. She brought a kettle of water to a boil, added it to cold water in the bathtub and took a slow lukewarm bubble bath. She put on some of Lydia's lip gloss and used a touch of Lydia's eyeliner. Then she gave hydrogen peroxide a second chance: she dabbed her field of blooming pimples with it. For good measure, she gave them a second soaking with rubbing alcohol, thinking that she would “suck these suckers dry” before applying makeup. When she did put on her makeup, she turned to Lydia's gift again, using a base cream that filled in the gaps on her corrugated face, before putting on a final application that gave her face some color. She brushed her teeth twice and rinsed with Listerine. She shaved her armpits, but she did a sniffing double check against odor. She put on scent-free deodorant. Her hair looked like something you'd see sticking straight out from the backside of a runaway palomino. This was not the lingering effect of the hydrogen peroxide; she planned this new look. She put the dryer to it until she saw that it didn't need fluffing, but it did need
pasting. She wet it down, but it sprang back. It looked wild, and she left it that way. But what to wear? She wanted to be layered enough to stay warm if they ventured outside, but not so layered that she'd hide everything. She put on tight jeans and a cashmere sweater with a V-neckline. She'd put on a coat if she had to. When she looked in the mirror, she thought she looked like a woman who was trying to get picked up, but since she was doing the picking up she had no problem with it.

She had decided to take the Taurus because people were accustomed to seeing her in the 150. She knew why she didn't want to call attention to herself: if the Hmong, as Nickson had told her, assumed that a teenage boy and girl alone together were up to no good, the people of Dutch Center were not far behind. The old guard assumed that anybody who stepped outside the norm in one way was stepping outside the norm in many other ways. A teenager who had tattoos probably also used drugs. Male-female couples that had tattoos and rode a motorcycle were also taking drugs, drinking, having sex, and stealing. If somebody dared to step so far outside the norm that they dated someone from a different race, they were going out of bounds in ways that would be too numerous to count. That's how the old-timers of Dutch Center thought. They probably wouldn't say anything directly to her face.
Zeg maar niks—
they'd look at her, say nothing, and think the worst.

If she and Nickson could slip out of town without being noticed, they could ride through the countryside talking. They'd go outside the Dutch community, where the names on the mailboxes changed from Van-this and Van-that or De-this and De-that, out of the culture of “yah shures” into the land of “hell yeses” and “damn rights,” where the mailboxes had names like Brekken, Holm, and Rezmerski. Maybe they'd drive across the river into South Dakota to the forlorn town of Ludson where the abnormal was normal and no one would stare at them. They'd drive to a dirt road leading to the river, the one her father used to drive down when he took her fishing. Nickson would hold her hand and they'd stand on a bank under an oak tree and look at the water passing by. He'd tell her how happy he was that he had moved to Dutch Center and met her. She'd tell him that he was the most interesting person at Midwest. She'd tell him that he was attractive, that she thought he had a gorgeous face.
She'd tell him his lips were beautiful and he'd say that hers were too. She wouldn't tell him that his eyebrows made her go wild because she did not want him to become self-conscious.