The Last Letter (40 page)

They screamed for James.

More movement in the shadow. Perhaps the light wind lifting loose hay?

Jeanie grabbed her chest hoping to calm her erratic heartbeat.

They drew closer.

The movement was deliberate.

From inside the hole came two hands gripping the sides of the haystack that created the archway to the inside. A head emerged, then a body straightened.

Jeanie sprung to her feet in the wagon and dove out of it, charging through the snow. Nikolai held up the horses as Jeanie ran directly through their path.

“JamesJamesJamesJames!” Jeanie said. Her body filled with such pleasure at the sight of James walking toward her that she thought she might explode. She’d known he was alive all along, but had been too afraid to admit it, to believe in it. She was afraid a family wouldn’t be permitted such luck as to survive yet another catastrophe intact.

James held his arms open and from fifteen yards away Jeanie could see his mouth part into his quiet smile.

“Mama.”

Jeanie couldn’t hear her name leave James’ lips, but she saw him form the word sure as she knew her name.

“James!” Jeanie lifted her skirts and ran harder.

“Stay there! I’m coming, James. You’re safe! You’re alive! I love you!” she screamed.

James stopped. “I love you…“ his lips formed the silent words then his eyebrows knitted into worry and he touched his face, which had drooped into a frown before he dropped straight forward into the snow like a stiff board.

He looked like an actor in a play who’d been directed to play dead.

Jeanie reached him and pushed him over onto his back shaking him. “James, Jamie, James, don’t you do this to me after the night I’ve had. Do
not
treat your dear mother like this!”

Her voice rose, pitchy screeches sliced through the frigid air. Tumbling through her brain at once were the thoughts that he’d sought to protect her, his father, that he’d embodied such loyalty even if his father shared none of it.

She put her cheek on his. “All right, James, that’s enough. Enough play-acting for now, don’t you suppose?”

He didn’t respond.

Jeanie pulled back and looked at him, watching peace creep across his face which was more grey than pink and she realized that whatever allowed him to stand and walk toward her had extinguished like fire doused by water.

She felt his throat for a heartbeat. Nothing. She shook him up and down at the shoulders. Nothing. She pinched his cheeks, slapped his arms and embraced his lifeless body. And though she couldn’t hear any of it, she cried into the air, her insides turning out, as her body realized what her mind couldn’t make sense of. Her son was dead and she’d never see him quietly exude life as he had for the past twelve years.

As Jeanie’s mind unwound into insanity, holding her son, noticing everything about him that she hadn’t really paid attention to before—the scar near his ear, the way one nostril was slightly larger. Her fingers quaked as she brushed every exposed part of him.

She could hear Frank, Nikolai, and Tommy rushing to the haystack, pulling Lutie from it. She looked up, pulled James onto her lap like a baby and bolted her arms so tight around him that they went numb. She watched Nikolai hoist Lutie’s stiff, curled-up body and bring her into the sunlight. Her yellow ringlets, the only thing still alive on her body, danced with every step her rescuer took. Nikolai laid her in the snow and attempted to make her body go flat.

Jeanie began to hum, rocking James, watching the dead beauty, the one whose beauty had no prairie peer. When Jeanie was sure they would not be able to straighten Lutie’s body, nausea swept in. She buried her face in James, telling him he’d live, that he couldn’t die, that there was no way he should or could be the dead one in this scenario.

Rockrockrockrock. She said the words to herself as her body went back and forth, replaying James’ entire, short lifetime in her mind, stealing her existence with every second that told her she’d never see her son alive again.

The day the members of the Darlington Township cooperative buried their dead was the third that yielded warm enough temperatures that the men could bust through the frozen earth, to dig black holes, from which steam rose as they reached warmer soil that mixed with the still cold air.

The weeks following the blizzard, the inventorying of frozen carnage, living with Frank’s infidelity, addiction, and nearly complete isolation inside their hovel left Jeanie hardened, and each day, she dug further into numbness. She’d sat with James’body until Mr. Zurchenko dragged both her and James’ dead body to the barn. There, Jeanie had hunkered in to let the cold take her as it had James. But Katherine appeared in front of her, holding the wailing Yale. This crying and the sight of two of her live children was enough to make her milk come in and with it the core sense to go on with life, even if inside, she was as dead as James.

Katherine’s finger, somehow escaped the warmth of the cows and Aleksey and it had to be amputated. Frank took Katherine into Yankton where a doctor happened to be visiting his sister and was able to perform the surgery. Jeanie had been surprised at Katherine’s nonchalance at removing the finger, her pinky finger, but Katherine’s thought was losing it was better than poisoning her entire body and dying. She thought it better to cut off the memories of the blizzard.

Yet, it was clear to Jeanie that Katherine wasn’t going to cut off everything that reminded her of the storm. Aleksey and Katherine were nearly joined at the bone when not doing chores or studying with Ruthie—they were certainly joined at the heart. Not in a romantic way, but in the same way soldiers found common ground even if not good friends.

Jeanie felt grateful Aleksey was keeping watch over Katherine, to help her through her grief, because Jeanie couldn’t do it herself. She couldn’t discuss James even though images of him, words they’d shared, phrases that characterized him, were locked in her mind as though if she was to converse, the topic of James would be all that she could produce. Her language was reduced to a grunt and a hand wave when she needed something. She was blind in every way a person could be, and to her, there was no way to address it. She sobbed, either quietly, or madly, loudly, gasping at air, choking on mucus that she hoped would infect her lungs with pneumonia and kill her fast.

Tommy had grown sullen at the death of his brother, poring over the Bible, muttering and memorizing passages. He sang praises to God, especially upon the reappearance of Summer and Night who had ambled away in the storm, but had been returned by a merchant from Yankton.

Jeanie never told Tommy, Katherine, or anyone the circumstances of their father and Ruthie. Jeanie couldn’t bare the humiliation of disclosure or the notion she’d poison the kids toward their father, or the failure she’d have to deal with if her children knew she couldn’t keep a man or that the man in question was the cause of James’ death.

Still, Tommy picked up on something. Perhaps he knew more than Jeanie thought, as James clearly had. But at the sight of his father, droopy-eyed, all sense of his self swept away with opium grains, made Tommy flare with the anger that, inside Jeanie, sat as hard resentment rather than volcanic anger.

Katherine didn’t show any sense of knowing anything in regard to what part Frank had in James’ death. She wore a neutral expression, talked little, but seemed at peace with the fact some of them had lived. That she was alive and she’d kept Yale alive, too. Katherine was empowered by her ability to care for someone weaker, Jeanie thought and thank God, one of them was.

Jeanie felt the only glimmer of peace in herself at the sight of Katherine, competent, lucky, whatever was the truth about her surviving and keeping Yale alive, it was good, and Jeanie worried less and less about Katherine as time went by. Katherine’s age made her nearly a woman, but her experience made her fully adult.

At the bee tree, the Zurchenkos stood in staggered rows, faces hardened, no one touching except for Anna who was draped around her mother’s neck. The Hunts wrapped themselves in each other’s arms, Ruthie stood near Templeton, and the Arthurs felt the cold weight of grief standing with them, between them, inside them, leaving no room for any of them to hold one another in any sense.

Frank stood behind Jeanie, hiding from Ruthie. Every few minutes Frank would lean on Jeanie or pull her body into his. She would stiffen, shrug or step away as she couldn’t have found any more concern for her husband and his weaknesses if her own life depended upon it. All she wanted was to be dead herself. Jeanie could sense Ruthie staring at her, but she didn’t return the gaze. She didn’t offer an understanding nod for the pain Ruthie must be feeling at the loss of Lutie—Ruthie’s only family member except for aunts and uncles in Canada.

Jeanie stared at her feet, the scarred black boots that were too big, that curled up like a witch shoes Jeanie’d seen in illustrations of evil women. Though she felt nothing for Frank—she’d have to deal with him for the rest of her life and numbness would be a better state than constant anger—she felt rage against Ruthie.

She just couldn’t square the notion that a woman like Ruthie would betray Jeanie the way she had. Luckily, James stole most of Jeanie’s thoughts. Like an artesian well that provided a constant swell of water, seeping in from hardened rock many feet below the surface of the earth, from an unseen though consistent source, Jeanie’s pain did the same inside her skin. With its force, Jeanie had decided it would be her life companion, if there was nothing else she could rely on, it would be the constant replenishment of pain at James’ passing.

They would bury four that day. James, Lutie, Anton, and Art em.

Jeanie sobbed inside, but no tears fell, no shudders visibly wracked her body, though inside torrents of grief ravaged, punctuated by tremors of shock and disbelief.

Greta coughed and Jeanie looked at her. She remembered the day they searched for loved ones, stumbling on friends and strangers, standing upright, frozen hard, mid-step, their faces grimaced, so lifelike in their pose, yet so dead that Jeanie and Greta found themselves laughing through tears. It couldn’t be real, these iced humans, people they knew or at least had seen from time to time.

The sights were utterly impossible, yet there they were, people hard as marble, mid-stride. The storm had turned out to be of historic interest, nothing like the United States had experienced before. The newspapers Frank brought from Yankton delineated the way the atmosphere had shifted—low and high pressure fronts, the kind James always spoke of—with angry force, more characteristic of an explosion than a winter storm—the sound and fury Jeanie and Katherine had heard when the storm tore open the sky.

The scathing reports showed how the information that could have warned people to stay in their homes on that alluring warm January 12
^th
day had been in the hands of experts, yet there’d been no system in place to warn people of the impending disaster.

Frank put his arm on Jeanie’s shoulder. She shook it off and leveled him with a death glare before turning back to stare at the caskets then her ugly boots.

Jeanie was startled as Greta’s sharp wails took to the air. She remembered finding Anton and Artem just behind the Zurchenko’s barn, the brothers’ arms laced, gripping one another, frozen in sibling comfort. Jeanie and Greta dragged the human sculpture into the Zurchenko’s house, then lay it in front of the fire, Anton’s leg oddly to one side, making it impossible for them to stay righted, as they had been leaning against the hay. Jeanie and Greta cried and odd laughter ripped through the tears making the rest of the children and Nikolai recoil at the sound.

But they couldn’t stop themselves. Insanity had fully gripped them and with insanity there was no room for manners, upholding social expectation and the cackle of their laughter, Jeanie would never forget the sound of it, though she wondered if she’d ever be able to find it odd that they laughed; given the circumstances, anything could have been deemed a normal reaction.

They’d determined that it would be days before the bodies thawed enough to be buried flat or to dig the graves. Jeanie found it grotesquely comforting that she could visit James’ frosty body in the barn. She knew intellectually that it was gruesome, that she sat beside him, hand over his heart, trying to will his soul into hers, half-hoping it was still present in his chest, free to enter hers, half-hoping there was a God who led James into sweet Heaven to look down upon her for the rest of her life.

So, it was there at the funeral in the glaring sun that spilled from the sky, then sprung off the diamond-blinding snow, that Jeanie came to understand she felt as frozen inside as the bodies of those left to die on the prairie. Perhaps it was Jeanie herself who recognized in herself, her detachment from the death that lay statuesque on the prairie.

A minister from Yankton came to perform the service, and Jeanie heard none of it. At unwarned intervals, Jeanie’s numbness would give way and pain like a scalpel over unanesthestitized skin left her mind as loose and wild as a rabid animal. In the wake of that pain, she found a new standard for emotion, one that had risen to unimaginable heights only to maintain its bite until the bite became the norm.