Hers the Kingdom (13 page)

     I had not meant to tell Willa, but by the time she came home from school, I was about to burst. It all came spilling out, the words tumbling one over the other—about Grandmother and her hands, and the nephews, and Mama's being so scared, and how we went to the lawyers and all the horses in the streets, and no one saying anything at all until the man said to Mama, "You own Porter Farm, Ma'am," and the long, long wait in the station where the windows were caked with yellow dust, and all the time my wanting to scream, to tell Mama that we had to go to see the doctor, knowing she wouldn't, knowing she couldn't.

     Willa looked at me for a long time. She brushed the hair back off my face, and then she hugged me hard against her and rocked me back and forth. I think I cried, I am not sure. But I think I cried for a long time, and when the tears stopped I looked at Willa, and found her full of anger—a terrible, unrelenting, silent anger.

     "I'm going to the barn," she told me in a voice that made me shiver, "I have to talk to Pa."

     She left then, and I was wretched, knowing I had set in motion events I had no way of controlling. I was sick with myself, with
what I'd done. I was sure something terrible was going to happen, and I was the cause of it.

     But nothing did happen. I had been prepared for a storm when Willa came back, but there was no storm. She had been angry, now she seemed calm. She put her arm around my waist and hugged me to her. That night we slept together, Willa hugging my crooked spine to her.

     "Mama's got what she wants, now," she told me, "but you are going to have your turn, too."

     That summer after Grandmother's death I became the object of Willa's total attention. "If you can walk," she said to me, "you can ride." The idea had not occurred to me, but Willa made it seem possible.

     Pa objected but he did not stop us. Mama didn't come out of the house. Only the boys argued with Willa and she argued back. "You're going to kill her," one of the boys said. Willa answered, "Nonsense. On a horse Lena will have four good legs under her, just like the rest of us." They railed and fussed at her, but when they saw that she was unmovable, and I was determined to try, they gave in.

     After a few spills, I did learn to ride. Even Mama admitted that, next to Gib, I had the best hands of anyone on the farm when it came to handling a horse. Finally, I was able to go flying down the lane of poplars, the wind in my face. It was as wonderful as I had imagined it to be. In some ways, learning to ride blunted the disappointment I would feel the following year, when Willa and I went to Chicago to see the specialist, only to learn that there was nothing to be done for a condition such as mine.

     Still I knew, and I believe that Mama knew, that Willa never forgave her. She understood Mama's fears; she watched Mama's world shrink. After Grandmother's death, Mama had not been off the farm; she would hardly leave the grounds surrounding the house. Willa understood, I am sure of it, yet she was still unforgiving. I think it had to do with her belief that there is a limit
to what you can allow yourself to fear, that there is a time when fear must be faced.

     Willa would roam for whole days, ranging as far as the river, tracking a Cooper's hawk or a peregrine falcon or a golden eagle. The boys teased her that a proper young woman would be interested in songbirds. Willa would tell them, then, in minute and gory detail, how a peregrine could kill a sparrow in mid-flight, with its hooked bill neatly snapping the bird's spinal cord. It was, she would tell them with delight, the cleanest kill that could be imagined.

     As Willa's world was expanding, Mama's was constricting. She wouldn't, or couldn't, fight it. Willa chose to believe she wouldn't, and had no sympathy. I could only feel sad. When we were little, Mama would take some of us blackberry picking in the gulleys beyond the woods. We would put on old sunhats and wear long sleeves and bring gloves to keep the prickles from scratching us. We would walk for an hour or more until we found Mama's favorite thickets. She knew all of them. I think that once she knew every bush on the farm.

     When she wasn't heavy with child, she would take us to the climbing trees in the woods, and heft herself up into the branches, as high as any of us. Even when she got heavy, she could climb. She would tell us about how she and Emma were followed by small prairie wolves and had to wait in the trees until Grandfather came to rescue them. In Mama's stories, Grandfather always came to find them, he always knew where they were. Sometimes, Mama would even take us to the pool in the river where she and Emma and Pa had gone swimming. They had called it the Blue Pool and they said it had no bottom, it was so deep, and only Grandfather knew where it was.

     After we returned from Chicago, Mama never went berry picking again. I remember the last time she went so far as the Four Corners, just before Owen came to visit. A peddler came through and stopped at the Four Corners to show his wares. Our neighbors came—Mrs. Fenster and Mrs. Havens and Mrs.
Jameson—and Mama and Willa and I fairly flew down to the wagon to look through his supplies. We bought material and buttons and hard candies for the Little Boys. When that same peddler returned a few weeks later, Mama walked with me down to the lane, but she stopped before the end of the poplar stand. She tried, I know she tried. I could see it in her face. But she did not go on, and now the limits of her world seemed to be set: the house and the barn, the rose garden and the orchard.

     "Have you ever wondered," I asked Mama, "why Willa chose to be married in the apple orchard?"

     I could feel the slow churning in her head, as she struggled to understand.

     "What?" she wanted to know, "Why? Willa?"

     "It's nothing," I answered, dismissing it, "I was just thinking about Willa and Owen, and the wedding."

     "Willa's going to have a young one," Mama said.

     My sewing slid to the floor; when I leaned forward to retrieve it, I fell sideways, bumping my head.

     Mama helped me, smoothed my dress, and when she saw I was not hurt, she said: "Willa wants you to come to her, she says she needs you."

     I said nothing, only waited.

     "Pa says it's only right that you should go. Pa says, 'It's done.'"

     
Pa says: it's done.

     I had told Willa that she would never let me go, and Willa had said: You will have your turn.

Willa wrote: "Dearest, you are coming to California. I did not write to you about it before, because I wanted to be certain that Pa would not change his mind. He did not.

     "Our first child will be born in the spring. I want you with me. I hope that you will come to stay, to make your home with us. These
are my reasons: I am sure that you will thrive in a climate which is warm and dry all year round. Owen agrees, and he is much more knowledgeable about the healing qualities of climate than I am. It is likely that you will not marry, given your physical condition. If you stay in Illinois you will spend the rest of your life with Mama and Pa, tending them in their old age. And when they are gone, what are you to do? If you join our family you will live a fuller life, one more nearly your own. As you are much more patient than I, I am sure you will make a better mother, in many respects. I propose to share my children with you. It has always seemed to me that two mothers are better than one—for children and mothers alike. If you agree, we can test my theory. Owen is as determined as I that you become part of our family, and his reasons are as selfish as mine: He travels much of the time, and knows I will be happier and less lonely if you are here. He also knows how sensible you are, and how much I have missed you.

     "In spite of our admitted selfishness, I do believe a life in California will be good for you, and happier. Come and share our life. Soon, dear."

Winter broke then and I resumed my daily pilgrimages to the Four Corners to collect the mail. I wrapped myself in wool and pulled on boots on a day in March when snow threatened, but the air and the earth smelled of spring. The envelope was in the post box, the ticket in the envelope. Willa's letter said only: "Quickly, now. Come."

     A cardinal flew to a fencepost across the way, and considered me, its unnatural red the only color in the whole dun-drab expanse of the prairie. Big, wet flakes of snow began to drop, melting as they touched the earth, as they touched my face and mixed with the tears that were slipping, flowing. I was laughing then, laughing out loud . . . at the silly, outrageous bird on the fencepost, at the snow that would not stick, at the girl with the twisted back who was going to California.

THE PAGES OF my journal which tell of my trip west were among those wetted when I dropped my book in the creek at the time of the big fire, so that the ink runs together, just as the details of that journey run blurred in my mind. Only here and there do a few words stand clear on the page, as a few memories stand clear in my mind. Pa and the boys on the station platform in Springfield, their eyes squinting as if against the noon glare, awkward in their leavetaking. Except for Val, who of us all was not fearful of tears. The others, my rough and sweetly shy brothers, looked away as Val hugged me, as they wished they might but could not. I remember that my heart wrenched. I remember that I was to remind Pa to stop at the dry goods store to buy three yards of muslin. I remember that I ached for the train to come and free me from the weight of their love.

     In a few clear lines floating in a sea of ink, my journal tells me that for lunch on the first day of my odyssey west, I was offered crullers, pound cake, hard-boiled eggs, deviled ham, roast chicken, and canned fruit, and that I was to take the hotel train that would leave Omaha on Thursday.

     The train moved, all the while, westward. I rocked endlessly through the shantytowns that had sprung up along the tracks, rooted to my seat, afraid to move until the conductor directed me. I remember the grit in my teeth, coal dust from the engine; I remember that my stomach churned as the noise and the motion entered and possessed me.

     In Omaha a woman with a sickly, complaining child boarded my car and took the seat nearest me. Soon enough she had attached herself to me, sure that a young crippled girl would be grateful for her company. Strangers expect cripples to be thankful for ordinary kindnesses. I disguised my resentment and resigned myself to helping care for the sickly child. It was a task I did not want, but could not escape. Perhaps it was just as well, for it left me less time to consider the world I was about to enter, or to be awed by the world from which I was separated by the glass and wood of the Central Pacific car.

     It had been arranged that I should rest in San Francisco for a few days before continuing the journey to the south of California. Sara had insisted that I be her guest at the Emory home on Nob Hill. The idea of spending two days in the home of a stranger, and a rich one, terrified me, who had never been away from home alone in my life, but Willa insisted that I must. And Sara wrote such a kind letter that I could offer no resistance.

     The memory of the day I boarded the ferryboat for San Francisco remains as clear in my mind as the day itself; a sharp wind was blowing and the air seemed to define all objects. No fog, no foghorns, nothing but a peculiar clarity. In San Francisco all was noise and confusion. Everyone seemed to know where they were going, and everyone pushed and shoved until I was being buffeted by a surge of people. Then I felt a hand on mine and a voice in my ear which said, "I've come to rescue you." I knew by her big, round, and serious eyes that it had to be Sara.

     "Miss Hunt?" I whispered.

     "Lena, yes—I'm Sara," she said.

     I thought she looked like nothing so much as a drab little freckled hen, with her rough, red skin and the gums of her teeth showing when she smiled. Yet I knew, instantly, why Willa had liked Sara Hunt. She might be drab, but she was not dull. You had but to look into her eyes to know that.

     With her hand firmly on mine, she guided me to a shining black phaeton and told the servant, a big man in a thick black coat, to collect my baggage. When we were settled together in the carriage she said, "I recognized you at once. I just looked for the girl with the crippled back."