The Last Letter (15 page)

Frank ignored her and tucked the knife between the bedstead and the wall. Jeanie paced the floor, wishing she had thrown herself into the flames as they passed by.

Jeanie yanked on the hot door, ignoring the scalding handle. The door stuck then gave way, sending Jeanie backward onto her bottom. She scrambled to her feet.

Lutie and Frank implored her to stop, saying it was too smoky and searing hot to attempt to walk around.

“Those are my children!
Our
children!” Jeanie poked her finger accusingly at Frank’s shocked face. She stepped outside where the charred heat bore right through her boots, making that tedious human instinct toward survival kick in, and so, she shut the door, and lay her forehead against it, trying to divine the spirits of her children as they must be circling the dugout, having come to bid goodbye before heading into Heaven, wishing the God she wasn’t sure she believed in would perform a miracle and take her life right then.

Jeanie plastered her head and hands against the hot door, awaiting the smoke to clear so she could find their bodies, their little, innocent bodies. She squeezed her eyes at the thought of them crisp as smoked pheasant.

“Nonononononono! This can’t be happening! This can’t be happening!” She pounded slowly on the door. Running through one track of her mind was the conversation Lutie and Frank were having behind her—how Lutie had saved them by forcing them down the hill into the dugout—Frank’s words tripping over one another as he repeated their children’s names, pronouncing them dead.

Slamming down another track of her brain was the intellectual agreement that Frank was right. That Jeanie had been right in believing they were dead, how could they not be? But in hearing Frank wail and moan and tread in his pain while Lutie soothed at him, another track in Jeanie’s mind took over saying there was no way they were dead.

That their family had suffered plenty and there was no way God would push pain further into their good souls. Simultaneously, she told herself, as she’d suspected there wasn’t really a God at all. Not one like she’d learned about as a child. There was no God, not in places like that. She’d kill herself if even one of her children was dead. She’d have to.

And, it was all Frank’s fault. His big dreams and flailing, wild energy that, this time, put them in a position they couldn’t reverse or tackle or transform. Every bit of it, them being on the prairie in the first place, him convincing her to let the children roam like livestock. Jeanie ripped away from the door and began swinging at Frank. Anger broke loose from the recesses of her bones and flooded her bloodstream, took over her actions and sent her smacking and kicking and wailing at Frank. “Now, you stop your bawling! You help me send good thoughts to the kids! They’re alive! They are not dead! So gather yourselves up and just…well, find some belief and make it real.”

Jeanie stopped hitting and covered her mouth with her hand. She had never been the violent type. She shuddered and quivered as she replayed her actions in her mind. She’d never felt so out of control and hateful and empty. Frank stood, staring at her, crying without sobbing. Tears snaked through the black soot on his cheeks, the whites of his eyes flamed red, matching the flames that had driven by. Lutie’s jaw slackened, her eyes shifted, showing fear.

Jeanie bit the inside of her cheek. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” It was that moment that Jeanie found some clarity in what kind of character she possessed. She’d lived her life, prior to prairie life, moving from one special event to the next, aspects of them stilled and sealed in her mind to mull over after the fact.

Like paintings in a museum, or drawings in her publications, the actual scene at the time of the rendering didn’t matter—the afterimage was paramount, the pictures that Jeanie revisited, enjoying more than the events themselves. It was then she realized the prairie would not afford her that kind of existence. It would be minute-to-minute experience that would leave afterimages she preferred to forget.

“You are cold and mercenary,” Frank said, his voice as cold as he proclaimed her innards to be.

“I’m not cold, Frank. I’m just not…” Jeanie leaned her forehead against the door.

“Not
what,”
Frank said.

Like her mind was suddenly as organized as the card catalog in the Des Moines public library, Jeanie sorted through scads of words she could use in the next exchange, but she was sure to be careful in her selection. “I’m not you.”

A crack suddenly tore through the relative silence and settling smog. The three in the dugout jumped at the crisp, pointed noise. Jeanie and Frank looked around and went to the window. What could it be now?

“Thunder,” Lutie said. “It’s going to rain.”

And, before Jeanie could wrench the door open, pellets of rain were pitting the land, cleansing it. The earth hissed as it accepted the water with the joy it would feel if it could. Although it was not cool enough to head into the plains yet, Jeanie shoved a water bucket and a water pail outside to gather the falling rain. It was a sign. Jeanie was surer than ever the children were somehow safe, even if she didn’t know how they could possibly be.

Marble-sized raindrops pummeled the earth for some time. When she could stand it no longer, Jeanie risked her feet burning on the scorched ground, and tore out of the dugout and up the side. She stood there as thick drapes of wind and water plummeted and pushed and shifted direction, thrusting her body from side to side. Jeanie dug in and waited for it to slow enough that she would be able to start looking for the children. She raised her hands heavenward and closed her eyes to the barrage. She could feel her children, sense them breathing as sure as she was herself. They were alive.

When she managed to force her eyes open, she could see needle straight bolts of lightning marching toward her then forming webs in the sky, nearly surrounding her in their flame. She wasn’t afraid of dying, knowing that if she could stand in that storm and live, her kids would certainly have been saved a similar miracle. She would make it so, if only in her head it was true, that was okay.

Like the waves of cramps that often gripped her, the rain dumped over her then lessened before brutalizing her again, before totally fading away. She turned, looking around, stretching her hearing for voices, anything human. Frank and Lutie joined her atop the dugout. Lutie grasped Frank’s arm as though he were her father, but her expression, the way she allowed him to hold her up and look at him in what was clearly an adoring fashion, made Jeanie think Lutie’s motives were anything but childlike.

They headed out onto the land, not sure where they were going, but they followed Jeanie without a single question as to why. They walked for a time, plodding over the ebony dirt.

“There!” Frank pointed, pulled his arm free of Lutie and began to sprint toward the open land—the bee tree. From that distance, Jeanie could see, three shapes that interrupted the expected straightness of a tree, as though it grew goiters during the storm. She got closer and her mind began chanting,
it’s the children, the children, the children.

Jeanie hoisted her dress and ran so hard she passed Frank. She grunted like an animal, bursting at the sight. If the children were in the tree, they must be alive, for if they’d died, they’d have fallen out. Surely they would have lost their grips.

Jeanie’s feet pounded over the earth and her screams sliced through the now still air, becoming shrill as an animal caught in a trap. The children were motionless, non-responsive. Jeanie reached the tree, and grabbed its trunk trying to shake them out of it like fruit. They didn’t flutter or show at all they were alive.

Jeanie stopped beating on the tree, settled her screaming and stepped away to get a better view of the three of them. Katherine was highest in the tree, then Tommy and James under him.

“James!” Jeanie’s voice was tinny in her ears. She struggled to steady her voice, to make it reassuring to the children rather than alarming. “James. You three come down right now. This is no time for tree climbing.” Jeanie’s voice shook again. She could not wait to get her hands on them.

James finally made a move, looking over his shoulder as his arms were still gripped around the trunk. “Mama?”

At once Katherine and Tommy began repeating her name then shimmied down the tree so fast they landed atop one another as they reached the ground. The three of them heaped together, alive, clearly alive. Frank, Lutie and Jeanie cheered, pulling them apart, lying each on his or her back, eyes gaping, but blank. They shook their heads as though they’d never seen the adults before.

They tried to pull the children to sitting, but they were slack from their muscles having been tensed for an extended period of time. Jeanie suspected they felt as though they’d completed a full week’s planting in just a few hours.

When it was clear her children might be struck dumb for some time, though able to walk, the six of them plodded back to the dugout, holding one another up, not speaking of the great exhilaration at gaining a perspective on life that hadn’t been available until that very instant. By the time they reached home, Tommy had regained his voice and in his normal melodramatic manner, he retold the events that led them up the tree.

Soon after that, James engaged, explaining how they’d been lugging the water home when they heard the fire crackling toward them. Even before they saw the flames, James knew what was coming. In the oddest way, though he’d never been amid flames, he knew what was happening.

“Templeton and I had just logged the day’s conditions— the dryness, the temperature, the winds, the pressure. Oh, Templeton—his frame house—where could he have hidden during the fire?” James’ voice rose in pitch. Jeanie held him around the waist even tighter.

Jeanie wanted to tell him not to worry, that nothing could have happened to Templeton because he was too nice a person to have anything befall him. But as she inventoried her memory of the fire, its fierceness, she knew it couldn’t have barreled through this dry land and not have killed someone.

Katherine sipped water and joined the retelling. Her face lit up, eyes wide and expressive as though intoxicated from having survived to tell it. “And I didn’t want to get rid of the water, Mama. I just wanted to run home, but James said we’d never outrun the flames.” Katherine spoke with her hands, illustrating her words.

“So we took the hand wagon with the rocks we’d filled for the wall around the property and laid them, circled them around the tree and doused the whole area with water. James just kept repeating that if the bee tree had lived fifty years on the plain so far, it wouldn’t let them down then.”

Tommy nodded enthusiastically while James picked at the mud on the bottom of his boot.

“And I just kept thinking of the light inside me,” Katherine said."Like the Quaker preacher Mrs. Hunt said. And I figured if the light was in me, it had to be in the tree. That God, in all of us, was more powerful than a great old fire. And the boy. He came and told me to hang on. He kept saying hang on, hang on, that if I lost my grip, I’d topple us all to the flames.”

Jeanie nodded and pulled all three children into her body thinking Katherine’s retelling a bit off.

“That boy,” Katherine said. “We have to go back for him.”

“What boy?” James said.

“The boy with the red hair, and the gold cross, glimmering so bright, I had to turn away from it at certain points. A cross like Preacher Vail used to wear when he came for dinner. It was tied around the boy’s neck with twine, but the cross shined like the light within, just like the Hunts said. He came to keep us—”

James and Tommy shook their heads, but wouldn’t make eye contact with Katherine. Jeanie assumed they were too tired to discuss the matter or they weren’t up to ribbing their sister for such thoughts after such a trying event.

“Katherine,” Jeanie said. “You’re exhausted. I’m sure it was just your mind, confused.” Jeanie knelt in front of Katherine, kneading at her body to be sure she wasn’t injured underneath her clothing. She did the same to James, then Tommy. She was utterly wracked with a hurricane of emotion, emotion that roiled her thoughts, sending them from areas of despair and sadness and joy and pride that her children had managed to save themselves as they did.

Jeanie knew there was more to the story, the reason the flames managed to just skirt the tree, and that scared her, made her think their days were being tabulated and scrutinized, checked off as being a gift that could be snatched back if the prairie needed to claim another soul and it made Jeanie think they should immediately leave the prairie.

It wouldn’t matter what scandal they left behind if they had their lives. What were they doing there, pretending the land was theirs if only they wanted it? She wasn’t sure she did, even if it meant Frank would lose his dream.

Jeanie left the children recovering in the dugout and went out to find Frank and Lutie. They were waiting for Jeanie to give them the okay to check on the others at their homes.

“Lutie,” Jeanie said. “Why don’t you and Frank head to your place, the Zurchenko’s, everyone’s, to be sure they’re all okay. That their property survived. That the crops did.” Lutie nodded like a child, seemingly less developed than Jeanie’s children seven or more years younger than she.