I thought I would lie awake long, and when I went to sleep I would dream of the rat scurrying up the hay-littered barnboards toward its escape-hatch with that teat in its mouth, but I fell asleep at once and my sleep was both dreamless and restorative. I woke with morning light flooding the room and the stench of my dead wife’s decaying body thick on my hands, sheets, and pillow-case. I sat bolt upright, gasping but already aware that the smell was an illusion. That smell was my bad dream. I had it not at night but by the morning’s first, sanest light, and with my eyes wide open.
I expected infection from the rat-bite in spite of the salve, but there was none. Achelois died later that year, but not of that. She never gave milk again, however; not a single drop. I should have butchered her, but I didn’t have the heart to do it. She had suffered too much on my account.
The next day, I handed Henry a list of supplies and told him to take the truck over to The Home and get them. A great, dazzled smile broke across his face.
“The truck? Me? On my own?”
“You still know all the forward gears? And you can still find reverse?”
“Gosh, sure!”
“Then I think you’re ready. Maybe not for Omaha just yet—or even Lincoln—but if you take her slow, you ought to be just fine in Hemingford Home.”
“Thanks!” He threw his arms around me and kissed my cheek. For a moment it seemed like we were friends again. I even let myself believe it a little, although in my heart I knew better. The evidence might be belowground, but the truth was between us, and always would be.
I gave him a leather wallet with money in it. “That was your grandfather’s. You might as well keep it; I was going to give it to you for your birthday this fall, anyway. There’s money inside. You can keep what’s left over, if there is any.” I almost added, And don’t bring back any stray dogs, but stopped myself in time. That had been his mother’s stock witticism.
He tried to thank me again, and couldn’t. It was all too much.
“Stop by Lars Olsen’s smithy on your way back and fuel up. Mind me, now, or you’ll be on foot instead of behind the wheel when you get home.”
“I won’t forget. And Poppa?”
“Yes.”
He shuffled his feet, then looked at me shyly. “Could I stop at Cotteries’ and ask Shan to come?”
“No,” I said, and his face fell before I added: “You ask Sallie or Harlan if Shan can come. And you make sure you tell them that you’ve never driven in town before. I’m putting you on your honor, Son.”
As if either of us had any left.
I watched by the gate until our old truck disappeared into a ball of its own dust. There was a lump in my throat that I couldn’t swallow. I had a stupid but very strong premonition that I would never see him again. I suppose it’s something most parents feel the first time they see a child going away on his own and face the realization that if a child is old enough to be sent on errands without supervision, he’s not totally a child any longer. But I couldn’t spend too much time wallowing in my feelings; I had an important chore to do, and I’d sent Henry away so I could attend to it by myself. He would see what had happened to the cow, of course, and probably guess what had done it, but I thought I could still ease the knowledge for him a little.
I first checked on Achelois, who seemed listless but otherwise fine. Then I checked the pipe. It was still plugged, but I was under no illusions; it might take time, but eventually the rats would gnaw through the canvas. I had to do better. I took a bag of Portland cement around to the house—well and mixed up a batch in an old pail. Back in the barn, while I waited for it to thicken, I poked the swatch of canvas even deeper into the pipe. I got it in at least two feet, and those last two feet I packed with cement. By the time Henry got back (and in fine spirits; he had indeed taken Shannon, and they had shared an ice-cream soda bought with change from the errands), it had hardened. I suppose a few of the rats must have been out foraging, but I had no doubt I’d immured most of them—including the one that had savaged poor Achelois—down there in the dark. And down there in the dark they would die. If not of suffocation, then of starvation once their unspeakable pantry was exhausted.
So I thought then.
In the years between 1916 and 1922, even stupid Nebraska farmers prospered. Harlan Cotterie, being far from stupid, prospered more than most. His farm showed it. He added a barn and a silo in 1919, and in 1920 he put in a deep well that pumped an unbelievable six gallons per minute. A year later, he added indoor plumbing (although he sensibly kept the backyard privy). Then, three times a week, he and his womenfolk could enjoy what was an unbelievable luxury that far out in the country: hot baths and showers supplied not by pots of water heated on the kitchen stove but from pipes that first brought the water from the well and then carried it away to the sump. It was the showerbath that revealed the secret Shannon Cotterie had been keeping, although I suppose I already knew, and had since the day she said, He’s sparked me, all right—speaking in a flat, lusterless voice that was unlike her, and looking not at me but off at the silhouettes of her father’s harvester and the gleaners trudging behind it.
This was near the end of September, with the corn all picked for another year but plenty of garden-harvesting left to do. One Saturday afternoon, while Shannon was enjoying the showerbath, her mother came along the back hall with a load of laundry she’d taken in from the line early, because it was looking like rain. Shannon probably thought she had closed the bathroom door all the way—most ladies are private about their bathroom duties, and Shannon Cotterie had a special reason to feel that way as the summer of 1922 gave way to fall—but perhaps it came off the latch and swung open partway. Her mother happened to glance in, and although the old sheet that served as a shower-curtain was pulled all the way around on its U-shaped rail, the spray had rendered it translucent. There was no need for Sallie to see the girl herself; she saw the shape of the girl, for once without one of her voluminous Quaker-style dresses to hide it. That was all it took. The girl was five months along, or near to it; she probably could not have kept her secret much longer in any case.
Two days later, Henry came home from school (he now took the truck) looking frightened and guilty. “Shan hasn’t been there the last two days,” he said, “so I stopped by Cotteries’ to ask if she was all right. I thought she might have come down with the Spanish Flu. They wouldn’t let me in. Mrs. Cotterie just told me to get on, and said her husband would come to talk to you tonight, after his chores were done. I ast if I could do anything, and she said, ‘You’ve done enough, Henry.’”
Then I remembered what Shan had said. Henry put his face in his hands and said, “She’s pregnant, Poppa, and they found out. I know that’s it. We want to get married, but I’m afraid they won’t let us.”
“Never mind them,” I said, “I won’t let you.”
He looked at me from wounded, streaming eyes. “Why not?”
I thought: You saw what it came to between your mother and me and you even have to ask? But what I said was, “She’s 15 years old, and you won’t even be that for another two weeks.”
“But we love each other!”
O, that loonlike cry. That milksop hoot. My hands were clenched on the legs of my overalls, and I had to force them open and flat. Getting angry would serve no purpose. A boy needed a mother to discuss a thing like this with, but his was sitting at the bottom of a filled-in well, no doubt attended by a retinue of dead rats.
“I know you do, Henry—”
“Hank! And others get married that young!”
Once they had; not so much since the century turned and the frontiers closed. But this I didn’t say. What I said was that I had no money to give them a start. Maybe by ’25, if crops and prices stayed good, but now there was nothing. And with a baby on the way “There would be enough!” he said. “If you hadn’t been such a bugger about that hundred acres, there’d be plenty! She would’ve given me some of it! And she wouldn’t have talked to me this way!”