The Broom
It was one day before Clara's flight home to New York. She threw a broom in the back of the red pickup truck without explaining why and climbed into the passenger seat.
"Mind if I drop you off in town and drive around a little?" she said to Raymond.
He stopped nursing his toothpick and turned to look at her. "If you wait a minute while I stop by the feed store, I'll drive you wherever you want to go."
She laid her hand on his arm. "It's something I want to do by myself. It's irrational. Just nostalgia." They'd talked about nostalgia the night before. It had bothered both of them to be talking when they’d expected to be making love.
In New York, Clara was considered verbal; here she adopted the local laconic style. "Last night in bed. . . ."
"Yup."
". . . do you think we're just tired?"
Raymond leaned forward and checked both directions before turning onto the dirt road that needed blading since the last hard rain. When he'd finished shifting gears and they were bumping toward Oakley, he leaned back and acted like he'd forgotten what she'd said. She knew he hadn't.
"I'm not tired," he said with a twitch of his right shoulder. "Are you?"
"A little."
"You tired of me?" he said, and looked at the road again.
"No. Are you tired of me?"
"No." The day was beautiful, the blue sky lifting high to make room for the mountains beginning to build here in the plains where Western Kansas steadily rises to erupt in the Rockies a few hours west.
"Do you want me to leave ahead of time?" she asked. She never said "ahead of time" in Manhattan. She must have been pulling words from the part of her mind that had formed when she was learning to talk. She derived comfort from thinking the phrases came directly from her dead mother, etched into a little daughter's impressionable mind, carried forward from Kansas, a legacy.
He reached across and touched her knee. "You mean leave today instead of tomorrow?" The impracticality was obvious. "I'll drop you off"-his forehead lifted a little, not enough to be bad manners, but enough to show he was troubled- "and pick you up on my way back." He knew where she was going. The truck almost stayed in the ruts by itself.
The grain elevator a mile away stood high above the flat wheat and alfalfa fields. So did the steeple of St. Elizabeth of the Plains several miles in the other direction. St. Elizabeth was a German Catholic town. The grain elevator was in the Protestant town, Oakley, where the Methodist and Baptist church were well attended but didn't assert their architecture.
When he turned into her grandparents' abandoned farm yard, she got out and stood on tiptoe to reach the broom in the truck bed.
He smiled. "You planning to sweep the place clean?"
"I guess I'm trying to be a good girl." And that, too, was funny because they both knew she wasn't.
"Watch for snakes," he reminded her, and then the truck was trailing dust out of the yard and turning onto the road close to where the mail box used to sit.
She lifted her feet high in the weeds. Above her, the disengaged windmill squeaked and rattled, turning in the wind. The windmill and the stone wash house beside it, the rusted round water tank on top, all had been there while the family passed back and forth below, drank from the well, nudged open the wash house door with a foot while holding a bushel basket of laundry. All were gone. The work they'd done to keep the house and farm from dust, grasshoppers, had been ultimately useless.
The door to the wash house was padlocked shut. No more swishing water, soap smells, shavings from gray soap bars, two rinses, sometimes three for fine goods. No more mother and grandmother, sister, sister-in-law, aunt and great-aunt voices. All had gone away while the windmill turned in the wind and the prairie, neither kind nor malevolent, absorbed the sun and rain.
The cyclone cellar had no padlock. Its long wood doors, slanting upward toward what would have been the outer wall of the house, were splintered and worn away at the corners. The location of the kitchen door where she used to step out to meet her grandfather carrying pails of milk from the barn past the windmill, up the cement walk, was now brush. The wild growth was already hot this morning, the scent of earth's sweat released. Insects were busy getting food, skittering and flying, buzzing and humming, eating and being eaten in a green, spicy world.
With difficulty she bent down and opened each heavy door. She pulled up and out. One banged to the ground when she lost control. She stared down into the cement stairwell. Stored air traveled up to her, swelling her passages. She’d opened a grave. Damp dirt smell and scent of sour milk penetrated her. Down there is where the separator had been, where the milk was separated from the cream. That's why her grandfather was bringing the pails to this spot, milk and milk foam sloshing over the edges of the metal buckets.
She went back to the wash house where she'd leaned the broom against a leg of the windmill, and carried it to the cellar by its smooth handle. She treasured the simplicity of brooms, buckets, steps into the earth. She bent toward the threshold, picked up the broom, and began sweeping. Corners caked with dirt had to be dug into, struck again and again with stiff bristles. She progressed down each step, delivering top soil to the bottom. The sour milk smell climbed the steps and passed her on its way up to the prairie. At the last step she swept the accumulated dirt onto the dirt floor, another layer of time added to the cellar. Down here, shelves lined the walls, but the jelly jars and Mason jars of beans, tomatoes, applesauce, pickles were gone. Gone the milk separator. Gone the little puddles of spilled milk the cats licked up. Gone the cats.
She remained motionless for fifteen minutes, and when she came up again and had closed the cellar doors, she felt better than when she'd gone down there, sweeping.
"Did you clean 'er up?" Raymond said after she'd dropped the broom in the truck bed again and climbed up into the passenger seat. He was expressionless. His head settled a doubtful notch closer to his lifted shoulder.
She smiled ruefully. "The cyclone cellar steps have never been cleaner. I saw the shelves and the spot where the milk separator sat."
He ground the gears more than he meant to. "Take that broom back to New York with you." She ignored his meaning.
"I want to show you something," he said. When they got to the place he was going, which was uphill, a rare high spot that the glacier had missed, he got out. "We have to walk from here."
They walked up a rocky hillside. The wind blew from Canada. They felt it pass them on its way south. She began to perspire and ran her hand across her forehead, then beneath her blouse where she wiped away sweat under her breasts. They reached the ridge that seemed high because the land below was so flat.
She looked for landmarks. "Can you see the farm?"
He pointed to the north. "Behind that line of cottonwoods."
Directly below them was the country cemetery where her mother, grandparents, two aunts, and an uncle were buried. His relatives were buried there, too. He followed her gaze. "They're all underground," he said. "You want your broom?"
He took a step closer and put his arm around her shoulders. He held her against his generous body. "You go back and take care of your husband," he said. "That's what will clear your mind."
"I grew up here. I have to come see the land and you."
"You take care of your husband," he repeated. "That's what our trouble is."
"He's not my husband," she said.
"Fifteen years. That's a husband."
Words died in her throat. Her world buckled before it fell into place again. He disengaged himself and began climbing down the hill. She looked at the distant line of cottonwoods, the gravestones below, the grain elevators to the south, the Catholic spire on the horizon. She followed him. Everywhere grass and plants constituting crops moved in the wind.
Marlene Lee is a recent graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA Fiction Writing Program and, is a tutor in the Writing Center at the University of Missouri. Her debut novel, The Absent Woman, will be published in April by Holland House Books. Her work has appeared in Other Voices, The Christian Science Monitor, and roger: a magazine of art and literature, among others.
It was one day before Clara's flight home to New York. She threw a broom in the back of the red pickup truck without explaining why and climbed into the passenger seat.
"Mind if I drop you off in town and drive around a little?" she said to Raymond.
He stopped nursing his toothpick and turned to look at her. "If you wait a minute while I stop by the feed store, I'll drive you wherever you want to go."
She laid her hand on his arm. "It's something I want to do by myself. It's irrational. Just nostalgia." They'd talked about nostalgia the night before. It had bothered both of them to be talking when they’d expected to be making love.
In New York, Clara was considered verbal; here she adopted the local laconic style. "Last night in bed. . . ."
"Yup."
". . . do you think we're just tired?"
Raymond leaned forward and checked both directions before turning onto the dirt road that needed blading since the last hard rain. When he'd finished shifting gears and they were bumping toward Oakley, he leaned back and acted like he'd forgotten what she'd said. She knew he hadn't.
"I'm not tired," he said with a twitch of his right shoulder. "Are you?"
"A little."
"You tired of me?" he said, and looked at the road again.
"No. Are you tired of me?"
"No." The day was beautiful, the blue sky lifting high to make room for the mountains beginning to build here in the plains where Western Kansas steadily rises to erupt in the Rockies a few hours west.
"Do you want me to leave ahead of time?" she asked. She never said "ahead of time" in Manhattan. She must have been pulling words from the part of her mind that had formed when she was learning to talk. She derived comfort from thinking the phrases came directly from her dead mother, etched into a little daughter's impressionable mind, carried forward from Kansas, a legacy.
He reached across and touched her knee. "You mean leave today instead of tomorrow?" The impracticality was obvious. "I'll drop you off"-his forehead lifted a little, not enough to be bad manners, but enough to show he was troubled- "and pick you up on my way back." He knew where she was going. The truck almost stayed in the ruts by itself.
The grain elevator a mile away stood high above the flat wheat and alfalfa fields. So did the steeple of St. Elizabeth of the Plains several miles in the other direction. St. Elizabeth was a German Catholic town. The grain elevator was in the Protestant town, Oakley, where the Methodist and Baptist church were well attended but didn't assert their architecture.
When he turned into her grandparents' abandoned farm yard, she got out and stood on tiptoe to reach the broom in the truck bed.
He smiled. "You planning to sweep the place clean?"
"I guess I'm trying to be a good girl." And that, too, was funny because they both knew she wasn't.
"Watch for snakes," he reminded her, and then the truck was trailing dust out of the yard and turning onto the road close to where the mail box used to sit.
She lifted her feet high in the weeds. Above her, the disengaged windmill squeaked and rattled, turning in the wind. The windmill and the stone wash house beside it, the rusted round water tank on top, all had been there while the family passed back and forth below, drank from the well, nudged open the wash house door with a foot while holding a bushel basket of laundry. All were gone. The work they'd done to keep the house and farm from dust, grasshoppers, had been ultimately useless.
The door to the wash house was padlocked shut. No more swishing water, soap smells, shavings from gray soap bars, two rinses, sometimes three for fine goods. No more mother and grandmother, sister, sister-in-law, aunt and great-aunt voices. All had gone away while the windmill turned in the wind and the prairie, neither kind nor malevolent, absorbed the sun and rain.
The cyclone cellar had no padlock. Its long wood doors, slanting upward toward what would have been the outer wall of the house, were splintered and worn away at the corners. The location of the kitchen door where she used to step out to meet her grandfather carrying pails of milk from the barn past the windmill, up the cement walk, was now brush. The wild growth was already hot this morning, the scent of earth's sweat released. Insects were busy getting food, skittering and flying, buzzing and humming, eating and being eaten in a green, spicy world.
With difficulty she bent down and opened each heavy door. She pulled up and out. One banged to the ground when she lost control. She stared down into the cement stairwell. Stored air traveled up to her, swelling her passages. She’d opened a grave. Damp dirt smell and scent of sour milk penetrated her. Down there is where the separator had been, where the milk was separated from the cream. That's why her grandfather was bringing the pails to this spot, milk and milk foam sloshing over the edges of the metal buckets.
She went back to the wash house where she'd leaned the broom against a leg of the windmill, and carried it to the cellar by its smooth handle. She treasured the simplicity of brooms, buckets, steps into the earth. She bent toward the threshold, picked up the broom, and began sweeping. Corners caked with dirt had to be dug into, struck again and again with stiff bristles. She progressed down each step, delivering top soil to the bottom. The sour milk smell climbed the steps and passed her on its way up to the prairie. At the last step she swept the accumulated dirt onto the dirt floor, another layer of time added to the cellar. Down here, shelves lined the walls, but the jelly jars and Mason jars of beans, tomatoes, applesauce, pickles were gone. Gone the milk separator. Gone the little puddles of spilled milk the cats licked up. Gone the cats.
She remained motionless for fifteen minutes, and when she came up again and had closed the cellar doors, she felt better than when she'd gone down there, sweeping.
"Did you clean 'er up?" Raymond said after she'd dropped the broom in the truck bed again and climbed up into the passenger seat. He was expressionless. His head settled a doubtful notch closer to his lifted shoulder.
She smiled ruefully. "The cyclone cellar steps have never been cleaner. I saw the shelves and the spot where the milk separator sat."
He ground the gears more than he meant to. "Take that broom back to New York with you." She ignored his meaning.
"I want to show you something," he said. When they got to the place he was going, which was uphill, a rare high spot that the glacier had missed, he got out. "We have to walk from here."
They walked up a rocky hillside. The wind blew from Canada. They felt it pass them on its way south. She began to perspire and ran her hand across her forehead, then beneath her blouse where she wiped away sweat under her breasts. They reached the ridge that seemed high because the land below was so flat.
She looked for landmarks. "Can you see the farm?"
He pointed to the north. "Behind that line of cottonwoods."
Directly below them was the country cemetery where her mother, grandparents, two aunts, and an uncle were buried. His relatives were buried there, too. He followed her gaze. "They're all underground," he said. "You want your broom?"
He took a step closer and put his arm around her shoulders. He held her against his generous body. "You go back and take care of your husband," he said. "That's what will clear your mind."
"I grew up here. I have to come see the land and you."
"You take care of your husband," he repeated. "That's what our trouble is."
"He's not my husband," she said.
"Fifteen years. That's a husband."
Words died in her throat. Her world buckled before it fell into place again. He disengaged himself and began climbing down the hill. She looked at the distant line of cottonwoods, the gravestones below, the grain elevators to the south, the Catholic spire on the horizon. She followed him. Everywhere grass and plants constituting crops moved in the wind.
Marlene Lee is a recent graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA Fiction Writing Program and, is a tutor in the Writing Center at the University of Missouri. Her debut novel, The Absent Woman, will be published in April by Holland House Books. Her work has appeared in Other Voices, The Christian Science Monitor, and roger: a magazine of art and literature, among others.