The Last Letter (18 page)

She shook her head, not saying what she thought. She didn’t need to, she’d said the words to Frank once before, when he’d done this same thing when she suffered a late-term miscarriage. She’d said the words a million times about her father since she found out the truth about his lies. Frank knew better than to ever bring any form of opium into their home. And so they stared, silently posing arguments that if verbalized would have done even more damage than the act itself.

Jeanie pulled up her skirts and took the cup to the stove where she dunked it into the water, washed it and dried it. She hoped that Frank would have left the dugout, let her sort through her anger on her own. But there he was, behind her, making her hate him,
breathing.

“Stop staring at my back,” Jeanie said.

“I’m looking at the ceiling.”

“I can feel your eyes burning a hole in my back. I’m not going to apologize or act like your regret is worth anything. I, right now, can barely stand the thought of you let alone the sight of you. So just go, Frank. Just give me some time to think.”

Jeanie’s verbal purge felt good while in the midst of it, but as soon as the words were out of her mouth she felt struck by her own venom. She hugged her midsection. This was not the time to make things worse, to push Frank away, to make him see her as weak and vixenish.

The image of the Moore sisters, indulging Katherine, popped to mind. The last thing she needed to do was spread her family out, she would lose them all, she needed to keep them close, and control them so to be sure they survived. Jeanie started to speak, to set things right with Frank when panicked voices wafted through the door. They both strained to hear then they looked at one another, questioning whether they really heard it.

Jeanie fled the dugout, shielding her eyes from bright sun as she did. The voices were coming from behind the dugout. She scaled the side of it, running toward the voices, behind the barn, then into clear land. She saw Greta lumbering over the land, wailing at the sky, her hands flailing, then tying her body up in her own arms before she ripped at her bonnet, her white blond hair that came loose from its bun and fell over her shoulders.

Whatever was happening to Greta, Jeanie could feel in her own bones. It had to be one of the children. Jeanie broke through her shock and ran toward Greta. She knelt beside Greta who had fallen to her knees, and pounded the ground, grunting at it. Jeanie unfolded Greta and pulled her into her arms repeatedly asking what was the matter. Greta choked on mucus and tears but then settled into a shuddering, quieter shock.

“Anzhela’s gone! She’s gone!”

By then the other Zurchenko children, Katherine, and Frank had circled the two women and were looking down on them.

“What do you mean? Let’s find her, come on, the children were watching her, she can’t have gone far, she’s but two. Let’s get up, we’ll find her, let’s go,” Jeanie said. She stood attempting to pull Greta’s six-foot frame from the prairie floor.

“She means Anzhela’s dead, Mrs. Arthur. Not missing.” Aleksey said.

Greta shuddered at Jeanie’s feet, jerking at her shins as Jeanie tried to make sense of Aleksey’s words.

“I don’t understand. She was with Katherine then, you, I thought, it was only for a bit, five minutes, how could…That can’t be right. It can’t be.”

But, Jeanie saw the Zurchenkos expressions fall, their eyes went to the ground as though in deference. Jeanie turned to see Nikolai standing behind her, holding Anzhela’s limp body, in his arms, her head, lobbing at the neck, her legs dangling, her arm flopped loose.

“She fell into the gully. The one by the tree,” Aleksey said.

Jeanie couldn’t respond. She didn’t believe her eyes, Anzhela’s matted wet hair, her skin bluish, but her face placid, appearing simply sleepy. Jeanie shook her head. Katherine came beside Jeanie and Nikolai. Katherine lifted Anzhela’s dangling arm up and laid it across her body, patting it so it would stay there.

Then she began to cry, apologizing for not watching Anzhela closer. She inhaled so fast and hard that her shoulders heaved and she fell to the ground, begging Mrs. Zurchenko’s forgiveness for losing track of Anzhela.

Jeanie’s heart stalled, she felt shaken as anger swelled her. How would Katherine be able to live with this? Jeanie bent down to her daughter and Greta. Jeanie pulled both of them into her body, rocking them. She looked up at Frank through her tears. How could he have been so stupid as to create a situation where the adults needed to talk privately? He was always trying to make things easier for him even if it made everyone else’s life so much harder. How could they have come to live in such a place where the land swallowed little girls up in flooded gullies when fires didn’t do it first?

Jeanie rocked Katherine for hours, leaving Frank to explain to James and Tommy what had happened. Somewhere between evening and night, Jeanie felt so out of control, so depressed that she almost asked Frank to mix laudanum for her, for the still trembling Katherine. Her body nearly begged for it and Jeanie began to understand why someone might use it, how easily the drug might become a reliable friend to charm one’s sorrows away. She was so saddened by the death of a child. She knew she could not survive what was ahead for Greta. She only hoped she could help her new friend manage the loss. So, in that darkness she held Katherine even tighter, thinking if she didn’t let go, she couldn’t get up and request Frank bring her opium to make her life bearable once more.

The funeral service was short and quiet. Jeanie didn’t make Katherine go and she charged James to care for her at home, to keep her still until she began to forget what she’d done. But, standing at the funeral, listening to Abby Hunt, Quaker opium-eater and by the looks of her poppy garden, opium-grower, Jeanie saw James slip into the circle of neighbors who’d come to say goodbye.

Jeanie couldn’t listen to the words Abby spoke. Her eyes kept shifting to the red, beckoning flowers, the way they bent in the wind, making Jeanie wonder what it meant that the entirety of the Zurchenko’s crops were overtaken in the fire, but the poppies were unharmed, as though they were saved by God. If there was a God. Jeanie reminded herself there wasn’t.

James edged over to his mother and whispered that Aleksey hadn’t been able to stay for the funeral, he couldn’t handle it because it had been his job to watch Anzhela with Katherine. Aleksey promised to watch over Katherine at the dugout. The rest of the stoic Zurchenkos stood like sentries, faces showing none of the turmoil Jeanie felt inside. Greta stood, face red, bonnet blown off her head, her arms wrapped around herself, clutching Anzhela’s blanket to her chest as she’d held Anzhela herself for the balance of her life.

After the service Jeanie was hesitant to go to Greta. She didn’t know what to say, beyond adding to the pile of apologies she’d already dumped on her. Apologies that Greta didn’t want, that didn’t do anything but remind her that the Arthurs, in their short time on the prairie had changed the Zurchenkos existence for the worse.

So Jeanie became the friend she never wanted to be—a useless one, lost for words, unable to make someone’s life better. Jeanie hated herself, hated the prairie, Frank, her father. The thoughts shot around her head, making her body fill with a mixture of anger and sadness that was new in its depths.

And, as Jeanie headed home, with Tommy unusually quiet, holding her hand, as though for the first time ever understanding Jeanie, she knew her children were all that mattered, that with every minute on the prairie that they all stayed safe, they were just that much closer to tragedy. She wondered whether this pain, the pain Katherine would have to bear for the lot of them, would be enough pain to stave off further bad tidings, death, paralysis, blindness, whatever was in the universe to make their existence even worse than before. And in what Jeanie deemed a sickness because who could think such things, she hoped that Katherine’s pain would be enough to buy them all some freedom from more.

Chapter 9

1905
Des Moines, Iowa

Katherine laid a wet rag over Jeanie’s forehead and she found herself offering words of comfort, the same ones she might have uttered to one of her children when ill. Jeanie stirred and groaned. Katherine shushed her and straightened the bedspread. Yale stood at the door, arms full of a pile of letters and some books.

“Yale? What are those? What are you…” Katherine went to Yale and relieved her of the stack, marveling at the sight of the yellowed envelopes mixed with blaze white stationary, tied with pink ribbon. “Where did you get these?”

Yale’s eyes grew wide and her shoulders rose and fell in at the same time as though she wanted to disappear inside herself. Katherine laid her hand on Yale’s arm.

“It’s all right. You didn’t do anything wrong.” Katherine looked at her mother then back to Yale before paging through the envelopes. Most were from Howard Templeton, some dated as early as 1888 and some as late as 1905. There was a smattering from Tommy, return addresses from sites the world over. Then there were a few from Katherine’s father—what must have been love letters between Jeanie and Frank, Katherine assumed.

“Mama said to. She needed them. She reads them every night. They’re her salvation she said. No one else remembers. No one else cares.”

Katherine took the books from Yale. The two Jeanie had written in 1885 as well as a collection of her newspaper columns.

“She wanted these?”

Yale nodded.

“But why, she can’t even sit up to read.”

“I read them to her.” Yale’s posture unfolded as she spoke the words.

“You can read?” Katherine shook her head, searching Yale’s face for familiarity two sisters should have shared. She saw nothing, but felt it, the love, the sudden understanding that this woman, even with her limited mental ability knew things about her family that Katherine didn’t. She was ashamed then angered that her mother had put Katherine in the position of having to be a less than perfect daughter and sister.

“Well then. Mother needs you, so go on and read. Give her the comfort she requires.”

Yale nodded and settled into the chair beside Jeanie’s bed. She held Jeanie’s hand, kissed it, and told her how much she loved her. Jeanie stirred at Yale’s voice. Next, Yale launched into the day’s events as though Jeanie weren’t comatose, was able to carry on her end of a conversation. Katherine’s stomach caved in on itself as though she’d been struck with a flour sack.

Seeing Yale so fully intertwined with Jeanie as Katherine hadn’t been in recent memory, sickened her. The sight of the two of them was so jarring that in Katherine’s mind, a shift occurred. Her heart was impassable, she thought, but her mind, was another matter. She suddenly
wanted
to understand, wanted to let her mother know she at least tried to make sense of it all.

Jeanie’s head rolled side to side as she clung to Yale’s hand. “Yale,” Jeanie’s voice was thin. “Yale, I’m so sorry for your life. Where
are
you? Where did I leave you? Why can’t I find you?”

Katherine stood immobilized. She watched Yale caress her mother’s hair, calming her. What was her mother talking about? When was Yale lost? Was Jeanie remembering the other night when Yale got drunk at the bar? Katherine decided it was simply a mix of morphine and the steady fall into death that were confusing her mother.

She lingered there, watching Yale read the letters, remembering a time when
she’d
been the one to read letters to her mother, when her mother pored over them as though they held sacred answers to her dire circumstances. And Katherine knew. She had something to discover before it was too late and with that thought, she could finally move. The answers were in the letters. Not the ones Yale was reading. The answers were in the letters Jeanie had attempted to burn, the letters tucked away in the trunk in the attic, the one that hadn’t been opened since 1888. That hideous year on the prairie.

Chapter 10

1887
Dakota Territory

The fire raped and exposed the prairie, land that then consumed baby Anzhela. But interspersed in the burnt, barren plains, almost immediately, certain sections of the land that had been narrowly missed or not completely ravaged, birthed vibrant grasses and sunflowers that shot from the ground like earth-bound suns.

The Zurchenkos responded much like the earth. Like prairie plants, it was as though the family was made to survive such horrors. They tucked their charred emotions away in self-defense, ignored the reality that their daughter and sister was dead and that Katherine and Aleksey had been part of that terrible day, and simply started to bloom again.

They took Tommy and Katherine under their plowing tutelage, having them spend each day there, attempting to coax the land into yielding crops once again. Though they didn’t have much hope for replanting the crops that had burned, they still turned the land as Nikolai had seen crops grow quickly when the right luck visited them in years past. Mostly the farmers focused on the gardens and crops that had survived the fire, tending them like newborn babies fresh from the womb.