It’s been four years since it all started, since the rain dried up, first just a few dry weeks here and there and puffs of dust swirling around. It feels like yesterday that every farm was wheat all the way to the horizon.
I remember I used to feel that we were the luckiest people on earth. Like that was just who we were, and it would never change. We’d see other people—dragging through town looking for work, people who couldn’t get hired on account of their background or prejudice toward their skin color or their threadbare clothes—and feel like we were two different kinds of human beings, the lucky and the unlucky, the people who were naturally happy and prosperous and the people who weren’t. We were fools.
There was a time Mama would say she dreamt of going back to England, to see where she grew up, and I used to believe her. But now I suspect—despite the terrible uncertainties beyond Canaan—that the main thing is she believes happiness is something behind her, to remember instead of to chase.
I’d still consider leaving if it were just me alone. God knows I’d be a fool to stay for Ellis, who’ll marry Lyla someday and set up on his own.
But we are like one person, the three of us: me as the brains and busy hands, and Beezie as the beating heart, and Mama as the soul we could never unwind from ourselves. We’ll probably die right here one day sweeping the front room together. We’ll just be skeletons with brooms in our hands. We—
LATER—
In bed now, thinking how I’d give anything for a piece of ice to hold against my cheeks. Sheepie is shivering and obsessing and trying to herd me out of the room. There must be a storm nearby because I just rubbed my stockings against the bedspread and there was a crackle and a pop.
I had to stop writing because Ellis came walking up to help me with the coop.
“I like doing it,” he said. “I have a technique.”
“Your nostrils flare when you lie,” I said, picking up my shovel and digging into the smelly waste at the bottom of the coop. The truth is I’m terrible at tasks like this: tasks that involve patience—I’m impatient in body and soul. I’m always knocking my elbows against the walls as I turn corners because it takes too long to steer my way around.
“You must watch me a lot to know something like that, kid,” he said, smirking. “Are you planning to declare your intentions toward me? Are they honorable?”
“Don’t be stupid,” I said and dug in my shovel.
For a long time we worked in silence, clearing the sawdust and muck, laying new sawdust.
After a while Ellis spoke, as if picking up the thread of a conversation we were already having. “She must have other letters somewhere, if that girl was so important to her. She’s hiding something.”
I’d told him about the postcard from Mama’s room and how I heard her crying. I tell him almost everything, and I’ve never told him a problem I had that he didn’t try to fix.
“Maybe.” Preoccupied with other things, I hadn’t thought about it much since we’d talked. I stood straight to rest for a moment and rubbed my arm along my forehead.
“That’s a good look for you,” Ellis teased, indicating with his finger that I’d swiped some muck across my forehead by mistake. He traced the line of it without touching his finger to my skin.
I winced and turned my face away, embarrassed.
He studied me, his brows drawn down over his eyes. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m not contagious, I swear.” His teasing, unfolding smile tugged a smile onto my own lips. Ellis has that effect on people. He recently pickled some tumbleweed and got us to eat it. He said we need the minerals. Anyone who can get you to eat pickled tumbleweed can get you to do anything.
We finished up, and I looked at him for a moment, too tempted to keep silent anymore. “I don’t need to find some old letters. I need to find a way to make ten dollars,” I said.
He studied me for a moment in confusion.
“Why?”
“I just do.”
“That’s an impossible amount of money, Cathy. For any of us.”
“I know,” I said hopefully.
He stuck his hands in his pockets. “I’ll think about it,” he said. Simple as that.
There are so many things I don’t like about Ellis. I don’t like the way he licks his lips when he concentrates. I don’t like how he won’t daydream with me about being millionaires or going away (“There’s no better place than here,” he says). Everyone would think out of the two of us, he’s the stronger one, but they’d be wrong. These are the things I tell myself when I feel most desperate to have him, when he is the most kind and tender and irresistible.
But nothing works. I always know where he is without looking—my eyes track him even when I want them not to. I imagine that I stumble upon him by the cow pond, or in the clearing at the edge of the property, and in my dream he looks at me like it hurts too much not to touch me. And we kiss. We more than kiss. If there were a God who cared how much any of us want or need anything, he would make it rain and he’d make Ellis Parrish love me.
Beezie is coughing in her sleep down the hall, and whatever storm was nearby must have passed because Sheepie is now happily chasing a fly around the room. In the moonlight the dying tree in the front yard looks like it’s wearing a halo.
JUNE 16, 1934
So many grasshoppers floating on the air today. I’m watching them through my bedroom window, and they fill me with dread. But I want to write this down while it’s vivid in my mind.
Last night I went to the Electric.
Yesterday began with three families missing from Sunday service. It’s no secret that they won’t be coming back. Too ashamed or sad or impatient to say good-bye, they’ve simply disappeared, leaving abandoned farms behind them. It happens more and more.
Last night I lay awake thinking of them with a sharp, desperate feeling in my chest; I don’t know if it was worry or envy. I kept thinking, what if they don’t make it where they’re going? What if they do?
Too hot and tortured to sleep, I slid out of bed.
I didn’t intend to go to the Ragbag Fair at first. When I pulled on clothes and my shoes and tiptoed out the front door onto the porch a little before eleven, I was setting out toward Ellis.
I walked across the grass and stood outside his door. I was daring him. I stood there with my heart in my throat, the thought of him so close pounding in my head. I shuffled my feet in the dirt. I was thinking if he heard me and came outside, I’d do something brave.
As the minutes passed, my nerves settled. He wasn’t going to come. I gazed down the drive. The full moon was up high above the trees, and the drive was lit so brightly it could have been a sandy beach.
I turned my feet toward town and started walking.