A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [80]
Emma was probably thinking in practical terms, such as who would spend hour after hour amusing them, day after day until September. I was thinking not only of those hours, but also of the details. I had never washed the girls’ hair, never cleaned out their ears or cut their toenails. I wasn’t in the habit of cooking. I might not have thought of any of the rituals if Alice hadn’t outlined a timetable for them in a letter of instruction. The letter, the only one I’d received from her, had arrived a few days earlier. Once a week, she said, she clipped fingernails, scrubbed behind ears, washed the hairbrushes in the sink, and set them face down on a towel to dry. She told me I should sort the laundry by color, as if it was important. “Don’t put cotton in the dryer,” she warned. She reminded me not to be hard on Emma about eating things she hated, not now, especially.
What is this? I had said to myself after I read the letter. I didn’t know how Alice could be so matter-of-fact. I didn’t know how she had the serenity to think of such inconsequential things. I thought back to how calm she had been when they took her, and then about how animated she’d been during our visit. I wasn’t sure if she was ill, or if in fact she was getting better. I was as mystified by her behavior as I was by the charge. Even the drought, and the sick lamb who had lost control of its limbs, even I suppose, the death of Lizzy—all of that hard luck and tragedy was something a person could expect as they grew older. There was nothing in our experience, nothing that had prepared us for being taken from our life.
And although I probably sound like a simpleton, not knowing that you clean a child’s ears or wash underwear in hot water, I had been absolved of those tasks for years. Alice and I had divided up the duties from the start. She had once said that that was one of the beauties of having a farm, that she didn’t see herself stuck with the drudge because all of the jobs were tedious. We were in the whole mess together. We had laughed over the picture of ourselves toiling as if we were part of a chain gang. Thoreau thought it was a misfortune to inherit a farm or even, I suppose, willingly own a farm. Farmers are poor brutes, he said, slaves to the soil. They spend so much time working, their aching fingers trembling with fatigue, their backs giving way, that they don’t have time or energy for the finer fruits. I have always thought that work is as common and fine as air, something that we become a part of. I am drawn to the out of doors, to the ordinary pleasures of everyday work. Alice used to say that if I was a bird I’d be the first one to sing, the wayward robin who’s cranking it up before a ray of light gives anyone allowance.
I have thought a fair amount about our farm, about our house that was built in 1852. It was still a good house, even though it didn’t look like much. There are thousands of those houses across the Midwest. White clapboard houses with old windmills in their yards, many of them standing empty now on the prairies of Kansas and Nebraska. They are a series of squares, built according to need. Ours are deceptively strong houses, stronger than the winds of a twister, determined against insects and drought and long winters, determined against time, against all of the generations that have passed through them. I have tried to imagine the men and women who have broken their bread in our kitchen, and tilled the soil and fallen asleep at night, too tired to take their boots off, as I sometimes was. The farmer who built our house, Thomas Clausen, kissed his wife good-bye and walked off to fight in the Civil War. An old guy down at Del’s told me about him. When Clausen came back from the war he turned the other way and went to California to pan for gold. I don’t know if his wife and children begrudged him his absences.
Alice once told me that pioneer women suffered from anorexia, that there was evidence that proved it was so. I couldn’t imagine Thomas Clausen walking up the lane from California only to find his wife skin and bones.