The Last Letter (6 page)

“We’re here.” Frank grinned and stomped again.

Jeanie jerked her head in one direction then the other, peering into the distance in every direction. “I’m
sure,”
Jeanie said, “Templeton indicated the Henderson’s homesteaded for three years and I don’t see hide nor hair of a pretty white frame house like his. I mean, those falling down sod walls over there were clearly just a place to tie the animals against the wind. The Hendersons
can’t
have lived inside that. I can smell animal from here, they couldn’t have…even a dirty frame house would be easy to clean up and make ready for our—”

“You’re right. They did tie their horses over there.” Frank slung his arm around Jeanie’s shoulder with a jolt. He stomped his foot again. “You’re
standing
on it,” Frank said.

“Standing on what?” Jeanie stamped her foot back at Frank.

He grabbed her hand and yanked her so hard that she stopped forming thoughts or words. He guided her down the shallow bank and around the front of where they had been standing above. There, dug into the hill was a hole with a door.

“No,” she said. She knew what she was staring at, but she wouldn’t accept it. She would
not
live there.

A wooden plank door clearly marked the space as a home. But she couldn’t get her mind to make sense of what that meant. She’d heard of dugouts, a step down from building a sod home, but she never entertained the chance they might inhabit one.

It looked like and essentially was a giant mud-ball into which someone had carved a hole. Spiky grass—not even the soft, pretty stuff that waved in the wind, grew from the top of the hill. Above the front door, marching across the top like soldiers, the Hendersons had created a foyer, of sod bricks, and nailed to the bricks was a sign painted with what looked like tar. “Help Yourself to Hell—the Hendersons. 1885-1887!”

Frank couldn’t be serious. Jeanie grabbed her skirts and dug into the material to steady herself, to stave off her inclination to tumble to the ground and melt into the earth at hearing such news.

“We can’t live here,” Jeanie said. “Like animals. You’re mocking me again? We’re a lot of things, but animals, we’re not,” she said. Her voice rose to a childish squeal. She hated him with her whole body, the blood rushing through her, carrying poisonous distaste. Clearly he felt the same to do this to her, to suggest she ought to live inside the edges of the earth.

“Just for a while,” Frank said. “Why should we waste energy building a new home when we need to dig into the land, plant some corn? It’ll afford us the chance to save time and money and you’ll be back in silk, in no time, fast. In the end it’ll be worth it.”

Jeanie paced back and forth. “Darling. This is a
shack
burrowed out of earth to suit
maybe
one person. One. The kids’ tree house in Des Moines held more luxuries than this. This rat-trap. Not to be ungrateful considering the state of our lives, but this is utterly unacceptable.”

“Your sense of entitlement is showing,” Frank tore a piece of grass from the ground and chomped on it.

“Two, darling Frank, there’s something wrong with jumping a claim, not paying someone for their trouble. My greediness got the best of me when Templeton entertained us in his home. I allowed my mind to wander to material comforts that will come later rather than using the time to deal with particular things we need now.”

Jeanie splayed her fingers in front of her, feeling all of her tension center in the tips. “I’ll just put away the notions that came alive in that twelve-hour time period and get back to where we started—building a 20x24 free standing soddie until we turn enough profit on corn, your carpentry…and I’ll sew! Someone around here must need curtains or dresses…”

She turned around, palms upward as though an entire neighborhood would drop down around them, full of people needing the services of a woman with expert sewing skills.

She couldn’t do this. She balled her fists around her skirt again, so hard she could feel each nail through the fabric digging into palm, but she wouldn’t look Frank in the eye. “Please. I’m begging you. And until a month ago, I think you know I went twenty-seven years of life never begging anything.
Please.
Don’t make me beg you.”

Frank took her chin between his thumb and finger. One corner of his mouth climbed higher than the other as though he might see things her way or that he was about to burst out laughing. Laffin’ was the way he always said the word.

“You,” Frank said. He unlatched her fingers from around her skirts and held her balled fists in his hands. “You could turn a heap of mud into a showcase any old day.”

A month ago, she might have agreed.

“That’s really not the point.” She flinched and stared past him, out over the land. Was Frank pulling a kernel of sincerity from the depths of artificiality trying to make it seem like the biggest truth in the world? For that moment, she wanted to believe that truth. What choice did she have? What choice had she ever had?

Right then, she realized like no other time in her life that they were stuck together and as much as they disliked each other, their life on that prairie teetered on the cusp of death and they would have to work as one just to get by.

“Come on. You’ll see.” Frank nudged her toward the opening of the dugout. He pushed the wooden door—its hinges screeched.

Jeanie looked back to see the kids standing behind her, their faces appearing shocked at the sight of their new home.

“Just stay there,” Jeanie said. She didn’t want the kids to see the place until she was sure they were staying there. She held a morsel of hope that she could talk Frank out of this nightmare.

She stepped inside and covered her mouth and nose as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. It was bigger than she imagined and filthier. Templeton’s home appeared to be kept by a staff of eleven compared to the dugout.

The musty, peppery earth filled her nose, pricking each sense to life, choking her on the reality of what they’d done in going there. She swallowed bile and cleared her throat. So her father swindled half of Des Moines out of their money? So Frank had stupidly, inadvertently helped her father do it? They were so shamed that lighting out for the prairie was a better choice? This filth was what Jeanie’s pride had gotten her. And now it was too late.

The evacuated family—the Hendersons—had attempted to whitewash one wall—they’d tried to build a layer of sod brick walls on the inside to give it a more finished look.

“There’s nothing like earthen bricks to cheer things,” Jeanie said under her breath. She touched the dirt rectangles where white flecks of paint clung to the occasional sprig of old grass that sprouted like thin hair on an ancient bald man. They must have run out of paint or energy and then tacked up their wagon sheet on the remaining walls.

Though she didn’t see any, it was clear that rodents had long since burrowed into the structure, eating through the canvas, leaving ragged holes as evidence of their unlawful entry.

“Well, at least we brought the extra wagon cover,” she said. “We can start fresh with that if we can’t lay our hands on whitewash.” She cleared her throat again to push away the suffocating anxiety. She had to find a way to make this work.

Frank stepped behind Jeanie and looked over her shoulder at the wall in front of them. “I wanted to start off in Yankton, too. To build a frame house, to work in the bank, there with Jeremiah.” He turned her around to look out a window and she was too stunned to stop him from manipulating her like she were a puppet.

“But after what your father did at his bank. To those people. They wouldn’t hire me.” Jeanie pushed away and brushed past him.

“I don’t think he was alone in his stupidity.” She picked at a crispy layer of dirt that shrouded the glass panes of the window.

“Moving forward is the only choice. We can do this, Jeanie. This is our life and as you scribble in that book of yours or mend dresses, and someday build another home, you’ll be proud of what develops. You’ll be proud. You’ll be proud of me. Think of what we’ll leave our children. Their children.”

Jeanie pulled up a section of her dress and covered her finger to scrape harder at the dirt on the window. She couldn’t will herself to fawn over his plan, to make him feel useful and faultless. She knew she should do that, for all their sakes, but at that moment nothing helpful came to her.

She walked to the far back of the dugout. Hanging on the wall was a dinner plate sized wreath with dried berries and flowers woven into it.

“See,” Frank said reaching up to touch it. “The prior lady of the home was just as inclined to make this a fairy-tale abode as you. She even decorated it.”

Jeanie slapped his hand away from the thing, plucked it off the wall, and shook it at Frank. Her stomach shuddered at the sight of it, spurring a fresh cycle of frustration and anger through her.

“Why’re you breathing like that?” Frank stood in front of her, his face pulled in worried furrows.

“This
is not a home, Frank. It’s a hole in the crust of the earth. And this…this…thing is not…it’s a wreath made of
hair,
Frank. The hair of the Henderson’s—the family, who according to their welcome sign outside, apparently walked arm and arm with Lucifer himself. And I will not live with this beastly hair thing as though it’s a gesture of hospitality from the Women’s Convention of Darlington Township.” And, she could not imagine having to share such a small grotesque space with a person she disliked so much.

Frank looked as though he’d sucked lemons as she shook the hairy thing under his nose. Then he pushed his hand through his hair, its yellow fullness flopped back over his brow.

“It’s filthy in here. I’m not saying we need a frame home, but it would be much more tolerable to make a home with fresh sod— clean sod.”

“Any way you break up the sod, it’ll still be dirt, Jeanie. The dugout is just temporary, to get us through one crop, one winter.”

Jeanie tramped from the dugout flinging open the door so hard it flew from its rusty hinges. She barreled into the openness, past the children. Tommy chased after her.

“Mama? Can we go back? I like to play cowboys and Indians, but I don’t think I like living like one. I want pancakes and steak and…”

Jeanie heaved the hair-wreath as far as she could, hoping Tommy would leave her alone for just five minutes. He hung back and Katherine took his place, running to keep pace with Jeanie’s angry strides.

Katherine grabbed for her hand and once their fingers were threaded, Jeanie felt small shards of anger fall away, her pace slowed, her heartbeat measured. She and Katherine grasped each other’s hands so hard Jeanie could feel Katherine’s tiny bones in her grip. She stopped walking and closed her eyes, chin dropping to her chest. She looked up to see Frank tapping his leg.

Jeanie smoothed the front of her grubby dress then turned to Katherine, speaking loud enough that Frank would be able to hear. “I can see we have no choice in the matter. We’ve come this far and there’s no point in whining over it. But just so we’re clear, I’m not happy and this place is a shanty. And I won’t pretend it’s anything but that.” She turned to Frank. “But I won’t whine about it either.”

He nodded, lip sticking out like a pouting child. She’d won nothing, but felt as though she was superior in saying she deemed the place a disgrace. And standing there, watching the husband she’d shamed in front of his daughter, it occurred to her that these elements—their disgruntlement with one another, her quickness to criticize, was not new. But recognizing it was.

And, at that time, though she realized what she was doing was cruel, she was too broken to act above. So, she left things, her cutting words as they were, lingering there, ready to be wielded again when desperation came and took her over.

“Okay, Jeanie, it’s a deal. Let’s just make it through one winter and I’ll carry the wood for a new home on my back from Yankton if I have to. Just one winter.” Frank clapped his hands before rubbing them together with the enthusiasm that was clearly bubbling inside him but was inaccessible to Jeanie.

Jeanie nodded, knowing there was no other choice for them. “I think I just need to clean up. A bath would shed some joyful light on this abode. I’m just not accustomed to carrying as much dirt on my person as the earth carries on itself. If you could bring me some water for bathing. I think I’ll be fine.”

“Well
all right,”
Frank said. “Let’s get things together. I’ll get the water and let you get to fixing up the…well, our home, and I’ll take the kids to show them exactly where everyone’s property is so they can get around unattended.”

“Mama?” James said, “Is that all right? I can stay and help unload.” He looked at his father then back at Jeanie. She knew how much James wanted their family to be content.

“My, my, no. You go on. I can handle the unloading.”

“But the baby,” James said. Katherine latched onto Jeanie’s waist.

“Listen James, darling. If this baby is meant to be born, it’ll be born while I work, not while I lay about like a wealthy maiden from the South of France. I think I’ve learned
that much
over the course of the last few pregnancies, wouldn’t you say?”

James pursed his lips and shoved his hands deep inside his pockets before nodding. “Okay, Mama, okay.”

He walked off behind Frank while Jeanie unlatched Katherine from her body and sent her behind the men with a tap on her bottom. Jeanie forced her words to be light, to cheer her family even if the sentiments wouldn’t do the same for her. Tommy had already passed by Frank, clearly loving the chance to explore.

Maybe if they discovered that one of them belonged in a place like that prairie dugout, it would be enough for Jeanie to survive. If she could just get Tommy to forget about his damn pancakes, maybe then they’d be all right. And, as Frank’s body disappeared from Jeanie’s sight and his voice from her ears Jeanie exhaled for the first time in what felt like hours.

Chapter 5