The Last Letter (7 page)

And as per Frank’s suggestion, he took the children over the plains, educating them on where their homestead butted up to others, to come to know the land with the intimacy that they’d known each nook of their home in Des Moines. Jeanie hoped he remembered to walk off the acreage for corn and a vegetable garden that might yield food fairly fast.

Jeanie’s sole responsibility at that moment was to set up house. The heat of the day pulsed down in great waves, nearly in unison with surges of cramping that gripped Jeanie’s middle. Thick gusts of wind burst occasionally filling her ears, taking away the sharpness of the heat momentarily. No matter the force or frequency of wind, the heat caused her clothes to soak into her skin as though part of her body’s makeup.

All of this sweat and odor convinced her the attempt to wear crinoline skirts into the west was at best naïve. She hauled up the hem of her white dress and latched it between her teeth, wrangled her hands behind her waist and undid the strings of the crinoline. She pushed it down her legs and stepped out of it then dropped the cotton from her teeth. The skirt collapsed around her legs with a heavy whoosh. She wiped the powdery dirt from her mouth with the back of her hand and said a short prayer to the God she didn’t really believe in that jumping a person’s claim wasn’t a step in the direction of the decimation of their dreams.

Jeanie looked around the space and saw nothing and most importantly, no one. She hauled up her skirts and pushed her pantaloons down letting the breeze cool her legs. Even knowing in her head how hot the air was, lifting her skirts lowered her temperature by ten degrees at least. After a short time she pulled up her pantaloons and stretched.

The cramping had lessened and in the absence of that grip she felt nearly wonderful, physically. She’d suffered countless miscarriages and two babies who were born dead since the twins were born and though accustomed to the notion that her pregnancy might not last, the thought that it might not still carried a shock. Luckily, she had the great expanse of building a home from nothing to draw her attention the minute the cramps subsided enough to forget what they might mean.

Jeanie stood atop their dugout shading her gaze from the elephantine sun. Even through the bonnet, it crisped her scalp like flour in a skillet. Since the children were with Frank, it gave her a chance to concentrate on her work without wondering if someone was getting swallowed into the great vastness.

God, it was vacuous, filled with a lot of nothing.
Why would someone happily, willfully go there,
Jeanie thought. Surely, everyone who did, had a tale of woe like hers, surely no one chose to live there. Even in the obvious beauty of the open land, Jeanie’s emptiness, the sadness in losing everything, felt appropriate for land like that.

Frank, she thought,
take care of the children. Please don’t fade away, forget where you are, what is at stake.
Jeanie sipped water sparingly from her blue tin cup and headed toward the wagon to begin the business of setting up house. She’d done it once before—at the barely ripe age of fifteen. Though even at that age, married so young, she functioned like a woman twice as old, knowing exactly what to purchase and where to place it and who to hire to carry out her wishes.

Twelve years later, she couldn’t rattle away the image of herself, standing in front of her home, awaiting her furnishings, primly attired, hat tilted just so and dress pinching her waist where it was fashionable that year. She cracked a smile at the thought. Perhaps she had been trying too hard to prove—screaming out with her actions—she was not a child though her age only whispered she wasn’t.

But, the truth was like a beating. Looking back she saw, nearly every achievement was the fruit of dumb luck—being born into a family that had every luxury and wouldn’t allow her brainless elopement to ruin her standing in the community.

She recalled her father’s response to the elopement. It wasn’t to shun her as she feared. He pretended he orchestrated the whole shebang himself. Jeanie’s mind spun the images—the parade of wagons that stopped in front of the mansion, the way each groaned with fine furnishings. The wedding gifts—twelve china and silver place settings, silken bed coverings, a velvet lounge and their family jewel, a smallish carved piano, along with other household items—symbolized something lovely in its use and also in its meaning. To Jeanie, having all those things meant life intended good things for her and Frank.

And, for over a decade, that was exactly the way things went. That very day she and Frank moved into their graceful home, her father and his best friend, Mr. Tumulty, watched as she gave orders, smoothed over discrepancies, and kindly orchestrated the mass of furnishings into an inviting home. She impressed Mr. Tumulty, owner of the
Des Moines Register,
so much so that he offered her a chance to write a homemaking column. Jeanie’s opinions read like controlled tornados with powerful bursts of words that made her readers feel simultaneously chastised and capable of everything Jeanie said a fine housewife should accomplish.

But that time had passed for Jeanie. There on the prairie, she chortled at her hubris. She scoffed at how she had sauntered through life unknowingly walking a tightrope that until she fell from it, she’d been unaware her life had been strung on a single tenuous thread.

She told herself to get to work. Jeanie hiked up her skirt, tied it into a knot with her pantaloons exposed for all the prairie to see and hopped into the wagon. She spit at her black boots, their ugliness. In the back of the wagon she wedged her feet in between her mama’s faded, though still crimson trunk, and surveyed the spare cargo.

Jeanie tried to unload the wagon, but for the first time since
it
happened, she allowed herself to recall every wretched inch of the events that occurred two weeks past.

Nausea gripped her as images of the residents of Des Moines popped into her mind. Elizabeth wearing Jeanie’s sapphire necklace. The calm, but chilling anger in Mr. Kaplan’s eyes. Lawyers and policemen roping off her home, claiming and proving that Jeanie and Frank owned nothing they thought they had.

A fly buzzed at Jeanie’s ear. She smacked it away. She shuddered, fully realizing she could never afford to entertain memories of her past again. There was no time to sit and mourn anything. If you weren’t moving on the prairie, you weren’t surviving.

She had to accept that. Her father sure had moved on. He killed himself and left Jeanie and Frank to take the consequences for all his misdeeds. Kaplan had followed Jeanie and Frank to the Renaults, attempting to explain his part in the looting. His voice was gentle in submitting to Jeanie that her father’s opium habit had been his undoing.

Opium? Jeanie scoured her mind for evidence of such a thing. She’d never seen her father stumble, sleep during the day, inarticulate. If he died from opium it must have been a one-time instance Jeanie had thought. Kaplan had read those silent thoughts and assured her that some opium eaters indulged for years with no one knowing the better, before it took control and made the user lose his soul and heart, to cause him to hurt those around him.

Then, she did remember. Her father, dashing into her water closet to freshen up, emerging as though, well, as though spurred by an outside energy, ready to clobber the world. Her father’s gaze cloudy, his mind slow as he processed the world around him. Jeanie had always attributed it to him being a thinker—lost in the world of his own mind. How stupidly her own mind worked to allow such things to happen right in her own midst. And Frank, he had gone along with things, with her father.

Luckily Frank hadn’t been industrious enough to mastermind any portion of the downfall, but still the facts were there. Frank had participated in the family’s misdeeds by allowing her father to continue his stealing, suggesting empty investments, building useless air castles out of baseless dreams. Frank was always happy to entertain such thoughts while his hand was in someone else’s pocket. She hadn’t fully realized that until that ugly day Mr. Kaplan stopped by to explain.

Jeanie began to feel dizzy. She collapsed onto the trunk in between her legs. Her thoughts crashed through the defenses that had allowed her to ignore, to overlook to forget. Sitting there, face in hands, a scent rose from her boots, sour and foreign. She gagged at the thought that the beaten shoes held the sweat and stink of another woman. A woman who’d run screaming from the prairie.

Jeanie sat disoriented by the odor of the shoes, the stench somehow conjuring the very person who’d once worn them. She bent over her knees willing the nausea away. She could feel the woman’s dampened spirit and smell her failure. In having to wear that woman’s shoes, Jeanie was wearing another woman’s catastrophe. Head in hands, crying at the thought she might give rise and shape to a stranger’s demise simply by wearing her shoes, bringing the failure to bear in her own life, Jeanie thought she might not be able to carry on.

Sweat pulsed in concert with Jeanie’s heart. She pushed her sleeves up and gripped the sides of the wagon. Invisible particles of dirt rose from the plains, and adhered to her skin instantly as though the filth seeped from her skin rather than settling in from the air. She shuddered, crippled by self-pity, heaving tears, grunts and sobs that echoed in the wagon and she figured, carried over the land.

Jeanie threw her arms out to the universe then clawed at her own skin, the pain seemed separate from her mind. She stomped her feet like a child, digging her heels into the wood floor of the wagon with all the strength she could muster.

She could see herself critically, having a temper-tantrum like a spoiled ninny, but was unable to stop. She was surprised at the force of what she had kept inside, almost without her knowing. And by the end of her fit, she’d taken fun in wailing as obnoxiously as possible—screaming out like an animal.

This gave way to laughter. And her mind, satisfied at having won out over her lacerated heart, knew that none of the incidents in Des Moines mattered. A flash of her father came—he’d taken money from good people, promised to hold it in his bank and somehow not fulfilled that.

That was his sin, not hers. No. She wouldn’t think of him anymore. She’d detached from him already and this final burst of emotion broke the clasp to the things that had once defined their lives. The fit was the last indulgence she’d allow herself. For she had much work to do.

There was Frank. She would deal with him. And, she would never let her children suffer as she had. Coming to know her father was not the man she thought was worse than everything they lost. Jeanie would protect her children from that fate if it was the last thing she managed in her dreary new life.

Jeanie nodded and blew her nose into her skirt. She could survive and do it well. This would be better—creating a life with the things they could do best—his carpentry skills, her writing, a garden, corn, eventually livestock. She began to feel her burden lift. They had the ability to create something rather than just take things and shift them around an enormous house until achieving the appropriate look.

This
prairie life would be better. It would
mean
something. They were the artists of their existence and in that endeavor, Jeanie plumped up, feeling optimism rush back in. Like she had felt when she bought a new flow-blue vase, when she wrote books that enticed people to recite her sentences back to her. Once they’d created a home, a life, from the ground up, no one could take it from them. And she would begin again, her writing, her life as it was. Only better.

Determined, Jeanie began to empty the wagon, laying its contents outside the dugout. She scampered down the tongue of the wagon, carrying clothing, a set of tin dinnerware and inexpensive silverware, mismatched tea cups and their chamber pot—the only remaining relative of their Blue Italian china. She dragged one of two pine hope chests into the dugout that Frank had taken out of the wagon earlier.

The first chest held the makings of optimism. Her fabric, silver scissors and thimbles, darning egg, paper, pens, some of Frank’s tools, and the letters Frank and she’d written in the year of their engagement—the things she didn’t part with to raise the funds to make this trip. It also held four tin plates, saucers, and three more cups, the skillet, a coffee pot, and a cook pot.

Next she yanked the faded green trunk that was filled to bursting with books—the books no one in Des Moines saw as valuable, apparently. Jeanie lost her grip on it several times as she dragged it and it scraped down the back of her leg. Outside the dugout, she popped the lid and stared inside. She ran her hand over the leather tomes. Of all of Frank and her discussions about what to leave behind, what they didn’t haggle over were the items that would lend their life a kernel of standing. Yes, they’d be plowing the earth and living inside it like prairie dogs, but from the innards of the earth would burst life as they remembered it.

Jeanie sat beside the trunk, running her fingers over the embossed title—
An American Family in Paris
—and stared at the opening of the dugout, its door standing off to the side. Chills crept through her body, raising the hair on her arms, turning the sweat she’d worked up frigid. What’s the matter with a little dirt? Thousands of people started their homesteads with a dugout. It’s only temporary. But the Hendersons…what happened…put the Hendersons out of your mind. Indians live in dugouts by design. Steel yourself, woman. Toughen-upToughen-upToughen-up.

Clearing her throat she stood, closed the chest, and dragged it into the dugout. For the first time she was in the dirty tunnel by herself. Her eyes adjusted to its darkness—like dusk in her home in Des Moines. The smell—grassy, but sweet and peppery—made her hold her breath. She forced a deeper breath and told herself that smelling a little of it at a time might actually suit her and perhaps she’d grow to crave the scent.

The coolness provided by the earth made her teeth chatter. She closed her eyes and the dugout’s filth and life filled her. Life will be good again. I will love Frank again. She remembered their sappy love letters. She’d once been utter mush in his hands. She could be that in love again. She would make it so, make them happy, make them rich again.