Bent Road - Lori Roy [29]
The devil’s claws are waist high. Walking toward Mother’s back porch, Jonathon guiding her by the elbow, Ruth brushes a hand over the pink, funnel-shaped blooms. The flowers are blurry through her one good eye. It still waters, as if she’s been crying, but she never does. The tears will pool for a few more days. She licks her top lip, which is silky smooth where it has swelled to twice its normal size. Even though it hurts, she can’t stop licking it. Sometime during the night, the shaking stopped. It always stops during the night. Ruth blinks her good eye and sees that some of the blossoms have died off, the tender petals shriveling and turning brown. The rest will follow and Arthur will mow them down soon. They won’t bloom again until spring. Before walking inside, Ruth touches one of the woody claws that has dropped its seeds, and she knows she’s pregnant.
Chapter 8
At the top of the hill, their warm breath turning to a frosty cloud that settles in around them, Celia and Elaine stop and wait for Ruth and Evie to catch up. The wind is quiet today and the sun is bright, almost blinding through the cold, dry air. In the surrounding fields below, perfectly spaced rows of green seedlings curve and roll with the flow of the land—the first stages of winter wheat. Their own land isn’t fit for wheat because it’s too hilly. Arthur says that someday they’ll have a few more cows and put the pasture to good use.
Celia knows this land well. She knows that the hollowed-out spot used to be a pond, that two fence posts need mending a quarter mile up the road and that there’s a patch of quicksand over the first ridge to the south. She knows these things because all of them, the whole Scott family, walked these grounds many times searching for Julianne Robison. In the early weeks when she was first missing, they walked them almost every day, and then once a week and eventually in passing. Celia gasped the first time Arthur showed her the small patch of quicksand, thinking it had sucked poor Julianne to the bottom, but then Arthur stuck a stick in it and showed her it was only a few inches deep. As Evie and Ruth near the top of the hill, three olive, round-winged birds rise out of the thick bluestem growing along the road, glide across the red-tipped grass and settle in the ditch.
“Prairie chickens,” Evie says, skipping up to Celia and pointing toward the spot where the birds disappeared.
Joining the others, Ruth nods but doesn’t seem to have the breath to answer. She places one hand on her lower back and stretches.
“You feeling okay?” Celia says, motioning to the others to stop. “Did we go too far?”
Ruth shakes her head and signals that she needs a moment to rest. Before Ruth came to live with them, Celia took her walks along the dirt road, walking as far as County Road 54 before heading home. She needed fresh air, she would tell Arthur, and some time to herself. But what she really needed was a place to cry where no one would hear, a place where she could cry so hard that she choked and hiccupped and when she was done and her nose had stopped running, she would return home, saying her allergies were acting up or the wind and dust had reddened her eyes. She never told Arthur that she cried because she missed home and her parents, even though they were both dead. She never told him she missed walking Evie to school or visiting with the other ladies at Ambrozy’s Deli. She never told him that she cried because in Kansas she is still afraid. She is afraid that he won’t need her in the same way. She is afraid she’ll never know how to be a mother in Kansas. And mostly, she is afraid of being alone. But now, she has Ruth. Thank goodness for Ruth, but having her in the family also means they must walk the pastures instead of the road where Ray might happen