Prairie Rose (27 page)

“We’ll have to walk home,” Seth said to the bundle of blanket that was Rosie and Chipper. “You go on ahead, and I’ll catch up. Can you manage the boy?”

The bundle nodded. As swarms of grasshoppers flew into his face and hit him on the head, hands, and chest, Seth climbed down from the wagon. Crunching his way over the insects that had landed on the trail, he grabbed the mules’ bridles and spoke whatever soothing words he could think of.

Stubby snapped at the insects as Rosie helped Chipper out of the wagon. They walked past Seth, a moving shroud. He put one arm around them and peeked under the drape covering Rosie’s face. “You know the way to the soddy?” he said.

“I can find it.”

“Here, take the gun.” He pressed the pistol Jimmy O’Toole had given him into her hand. “If you see Cornwall, don’t stop to think. Protect yourself and the boy.”

He knew Rosie would rather do anything than carry a gun. But she took the weapon in silence. “Seth,” she whispered, “what will we do?”

He said the only thing that came to mind. “Pray.”

Then he kissed her cheek and lowered the blanket to cover her face. She moved away into the swarm, and he returned to his team. Frightened and confused, the mules were straining to escape the harness. Old Nellie had made up her mind to stay put, and she was doing her best to sit down between the leather trace lines. Pete wanted nothing more than to run. He pulled against the neck yoke, thrashing his head around in torment as the hoppers assaulted him.

Seth muttered a prayer for Rosie and Chipper and then concentrated on the mules. He had invested most of his army savings in the mule team and wagon. If they ran off, hurt themselves, or overturned the wagon, he’d be in deep trouble. Crushing grasshoppers with every step, he worked to calm the terrified animals. Pete’s mouth grew bloody from straining against the bridle bit, and Seth’s heart sank. Even if the grasshoppers didn’t eat up his crops, Pete wouldn’t be much use until he healed. Nellie kept trying to sit.

As the moon climbed through the night, the swarm in the sky gradually began to taper off. But Seth realized he couldn’t afford to relax. The grasshoppers hadn’t flown away. Instead, they had settled. Everything Seth touched—the driving lines, the wagon, the road—was covered in tiny, restless insects.

“God!” he groaned as his team finally began to pull the wagon forward. “Why, God? Why this? Why now?”

Seth walked along, his boots crackling like a trek across an icy field.
Pray
, he had told Rosie. Pray? What for? What good had God ever done him?

Seth thought about the Deuteronomy verse and how deeply it had hurt Rosie. She had made peace with it somehow. She felt an absolute assurance that God was her Father—and that knowledge made her whole life worthwhile. Maybe God was Seth’s father, too. But truth to tell, God didn’t seem that different from the earthly father he’d known.

Just when Seth had needed him most, his father had run off and left the family—abandoned them. Left them to their own devices. Sure, the family had survived. Barely. Seth had begged God to send his papa home. The man never returned.

Then a second crisis in his life had led Seth to cry out to God. When Mary’s father had run him off the farm, Seth had been sure his life was over. What had God done to answer a desperate prayer for reconciliation? He had tossed Seth into the Union army to fight one battle after another, march thousands of miles—so far away from Mary that he hadn’t known she was expecting a baby. Hadn’t known when she died. Hadn’t even known she was sick.

On his own, Seth had fought his way back from the edge of despair. He had signed up for a homestead, bought a team, built a soddy and a barn. Then he had traveled back to Missouri and had taken what was rightfully his. His only son. Along the way, Rosie had dropped into his life. Rosie—an unexpected, unearned gift from God if ever there was one.

And now—now he could lose her, lose his land, lose his son. Lose everything.

“God!” he shouted again into the black sky. At the cry, old Nellie stopped in her tracks. Seth pulled on the collar. She balked, shaking her head from side to side. Frustration boiled up inside him. He slapped the mule on her rump. She sat down.

Heat pouring through his veins, Seth dropped to his knees. “God, take these confounded grasshoppers away!” he said through clenched teeth. “Keep them off my crops. Keep them out of Rosie’s garden.”

He angrily backhanded a tear off his cheek. “I want Rosie, you hear me, God?” he said. “I want Chipper, too. He’s my son. I have a right to him! If you let Cornwall have him, I’ll kill … that … that …”

He couldn’t go on. He brushed a handful of grasshoppers off his thigh and set his hand in their place. Rosie wouldn’t like it that he was shouting at God. He doubted she would call that praying. But it was the best he could do.

If he was honest with himself, Seth had to admit he hated God. Hated him just the way he hated his own father. Maybe God had created the world, but he’d sure bungled up the rest of the job. He was never around when a man needed him. It was a lot easier for God to let people struggle against impossible odds than to step in and protect them. Take these vexatious grasshoppers for a perfect example.

“God!” Seth shouted upward again. “If you let these bugs eat my crops, I’ll never talk to you again. You hear me? I’ll know you’re no better than my good-for-nothing papa. I’ll know you don’t care what becomes of me. You hear?”

Seth grabbed a grasshopper that was wandering down the back of his collar and hurled it to the ground. Then he got up and brushed the squashed grasshoppers off the knees of his jeans. Old Nellie had decided to stand up again. Seth took her and Pete by the harness and led them toward the bridge. Ahead, the sun was just beginning to rise.

“They’re eating up your scarf, Rosie,” Chipper said. He stood beside her outside the door of the soddy and held up the tattered scrap of cotton. Six grasshoppers clung to it, their tiny mouths working furiously at the thinly woven fabric.

“They’re eating everything.”

“What are we gonna do, Rosie?”

“Pray. That’s what your papa said we should do. I’ve been praying ever since the first grasshopper hit me in the head last night. I’m not going to stop now.”

“I reckon you might as well stop. God ain’t listening.”

“A good father always listens to his children. And God always answers our prayers.”

“I don’t think God’s gonna answer this prayer, Rosie. It’s too late. The hoppers are eating up most of Papa’s corn—an’ your potatoes, an’ the beans, an’ everything we gots.”

Rosie knelt down amid the grasshoppers clustered around the soddy. “The thing you must always remember is this, Chipper: God
always
answers our prayers. Sometimes he says, ‘Yes, my child, I will do that for you because it fits in with my plan for the way I want the world to go.’ And sometimes he says, ‘You’ll have to wait awhile. I’m not ready to do that yet.’ And sometimes … sometimes, Chipper, our Father says, ‘No, that is not what I’m going to do, my beloved. I have a better plan for you, so please try to trust me through this difficult time.’”

Chipper studied the fields beyond Rosie’s shoulder. His blue eyes were troubled, and the corners of his little mouth turned down. “Which way you think God’s going to answer us this time, Rosie?” he asked. “’Cause it sure looks to me like them grasshoppers have ate up everything Papa planted.”

She turned and looked out over the stretch of land Seth had so carefully plowed and planted. Bare stalks covered with living, moving insects pointed upward like knobby fingers accusing God of betrayal. The willow tree by the creek was stripped bare. Nothing remained in the garden beside the kitchen but a few pale yellow stems. The grasshoppers had even eaten the pith out of the pumpkin vines.

The pests had attacked the soddy, too. Rosie’s broom lay on the ground, chewed from handle to bristles. Holes riddled her storage baskets. Her cleaning rags were nothing but tatters. If not for the stream, she, Seth, and Chipper would have nothing to drink. Even the top of the well was filled with grasshoppers.

The animals had suffered beyond belief. The cows refused to eat, and Rosie was concerned that their milk might dwindle to nothing. The mules stood forlornly in the barn, their brown eyes speaking of their misery. Stubby squeezed himself under the bed and wouldn’t come out.

“Chipper, we are going to have to wait on the Lord,” she said softly. “Though I’ll admit I can’t imagine what he can do about this.”

“He better think of something quick. ’Cause here comes Papa.”

Rosie stood as Seth strode through the grasshoppers toward the soddy. His eyes red-rimmed, he grabbed Rosie’s hand and set a knobby, half-chewed potato into her palm. “They got into the root cellar,” he said. “That’s all I could find.”

“I’ll make dinner,” she said. She put on the best smile she could come up with, but Seth shouldered past her into the soddy.

Rosie and Chipper hauled water from the creek and built a fire using their cache of stored buffalo chips. She decided to make a big pot of potato soup—something that might warm their stomachs and clear their heads. But the moment she lifted the lid on the stew pot, fifteen grasshoppers jumped into the steaming water.

Finally, she pushed the potato in among the buffalo chips and left it to bake. At least the grasshoppers wouldn’t be able to get through the coals to eat it.

The grasshoppers stayed for nine days. They ate the cornstalks.

They ate the wagon ropes. They ate the wooden milk bucket.

They ate every leaf, bush, blade of grass, and weed in Seth’s one hundred sixty acres of homestead. They even ate up the old dress Rosie had worn from the orphanage to Kansas.

And then one morning a wind blew in from the west. All the grasshoppers took wing. Within an hour they had gone—a great black cloud of buzzing, swarming pests that nearly blotted out the sun.

Startled at the sudden silence, Rosie stepped out of the soddy to see what had happened. Stubby slinked out from under the bed and stood beside her. Chipper and Seth were walking up from the stream carrying a bucket of water between them. Rosie crossed her arms over her stomach and stared at the two of them, fighting tears. For nine days, they had lived from one moment to the next—fighting for survival with little time even to think.

Now … now what?

“Didja see that, Rosie?” Chipper asked. “The grasshoppers went away! They flew right straight over me an’ Papa. It was like black smoke—only real loud. I got scared, thinkin’ the hoppers couldn’t find anything left to eat and was gonna come after us next. But Papa said to hold on tight to his hand. So I did. Sure enough, they left us alone.”

Chipper and his father set the water pail down in the yard beside Rosie. She picked a few grasshoppers out of the water and tossed them onto the ground. Then she looked up at Seth. Neither of them had slept much since the invasion. Instead, they had sat together on the bench just outside the soddy. Saying nothing, they had joined hands and waited. Waited through the long, swarming nights until the hot, swarming days began again.

“Now whatcha gonna do, Papa?” Chipper asked. “What’s next?”

Seth looked down at his son. Then he lifted his head and met Rosie’s eyes. “I’m ruined,” he said.

“No.” She shook her head. “Please, Seth, don’t say that.”

“Pack up.”

“Seth, why? What are you saying?”

“I’ll take you back to Kansas City.”

“Kansas City! But I don’t want to go.”

“It doesn’t matter what you want. It doesn’t matter what I want. I don’t have anything to offer. When you came out here, I promised you room and board in exchange for looking after Chipper and keeping house. Your bed’s half-eaten up. And God knows I don’t have anything but what I can shoot to feed you. You’d best go.”

Rosie sank onto the stool beside the front door. In the distance she could see the O’Toole family filing over the bridge. Rolf Rustemeyer was coming from the other direction. No doubt they would all want to compare and assess the damage now that the hoppers had finally gone.

“Lord, what does this mean?” she murmured, bending over and squeezing her eyes shut as Seth and Chipper went out to meet their neighbors. “Were the grasshoppers your sign of wrath against us, Father? Are you punishing me for coming out to the prairie without asking your permission? Is it my willfulness in not letting you choose my husband for me—for loving Seth so much? Was it something Seth did? Or Rolf? Or Jimmy? Why, Lord? Why did you allow the grasshoppers? And why are you sending me away now?”