The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [119]
Franklin sent us postcards with special stamps he’d looked for, which I put into my book. Olea, Louise, and I enjoyed morning walks in Coulee City before the high heat of the day. We took the car out for spins. The new pharmacist in town worked on a poured cement wall around his yard meant to keep the rattlesnakes out, as his young wife deathly feared them. He drew lines in the wet cement to make them look like blocks or bricks.
“Are there snakes here?” Louise asked. “I’ve never seen any.”
“I wonder what he’ll do about the gate,” I mused. “They’ll crawl right under that.”
“Maybe I’ll offer him a finished board for the gate that can be raised or lowered depending on the season,” Olea said.
“What we do for love,” I said, thinking that cement wall the sweetest gesture.
When Austrian Archduke Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo, I read the news report but felt confident it wouldn’t affect our transport scheduled for January. I listened to that voice telling me to walk this way and felt sure I was. But one morning I awoke, sweat drenching my cotton gown. I rose and wrote out my telegram, taking it to the operator as soon as daylight showed itself. Franklin was in Paris, and I wanted to remind him to purchase insurance before he shipped.
Then I thought, How silly. Of course he’s already done that. I walked back home and took a nap.
At harvest that fall, we three women brought dinners of fried chicken, pickled beets, string beans, fresh baked bread, potato salad, and blackberry pies out to the harvesters. Louise commented on my appetite improving, and it had. I enjoyed the taste of the pies and vowed to fix julekaga for us for Christmas. My fingernails had even grown out.
Lucky ambled behind us to the fields. I offered to sit in the “dog house”—what the men called the chair on the combine shaded by an awning. A man sat there and sewed tight the ears of the sacks of grain, something every woman could surely do. But the very idea was met with solemn stares. Women couldn’t be part of the harvest crew; it was probably considered too much work. We were allowed only to steam over a hot kitchen stove in hundred-degree heat, preparing four meals a day to serve to the men. When he finished with his needle and thread, he stuck the needle into his wooden leg while he prepared the next sack. He pulled the needle out, held it in his hand.
“I bet you can’t do that,” he said, handing me the needle.
“Sure I can,” I said. I took the needle from him and stuck it in his wooden leg myself. He yowled.
“Oh, I’m sorry!” My hands flew to my face. I truly was.
“You were s’posed to stick it in your own leg,” he said. “Not my good one.”
“Well, you know how silly women are,” I told him. “We never get instructions right.”
The three of us laughed together when I told Olea and Louise, but I was glad it was only a poke in his leg.
“We feed the world,” I told Louise one day as we gathered eggs from the clutch Olea had built in our backyard. Louise wanted to keep the chickens in the basement of the house, but Olea and I demurred.
“I count only six eggs,” Louise said. “I don’t think that’ll be enough to feed the world. Do you think? It’s unclear.” She sounded so serious, and I laughed and hugged her. What would my life be without her in it? I wondered. I enjoyed the rhythm of this place and was reminded of the peace I’d found growing up on Mica Creek. I missed anew my brothers, sisters, and yes, most of all my mother, but this was the family given to me when I was desolate. I gratefully accepted.
“Fifteenth of January, 1915. Insurance exorbitant. Cargo insured. Not all ready.