Grass Over the Wanting

I am writing this in a hotel room in Grand Island, Nebraska, in a ledger book I bought at the general store on Locust Street for fifteen cents. It is two in the morning or close to it. The room has an electric lamp and I have turned it on and off three times because the quality of the light is wrong for what I am trying to do, which is remember a woman’s face.

Her name was Edith Vanek. She homesteaded the quarter-section east of my family’s claim, in what was then unorganized territory south of the Loup Fork, and she died in 1882 at forty-one years old, and I can tell you the exact motion her hands made wringing out a washcloth — a twist that started at the wrist and traveled up through the forearm so the water came out in a single sheet — but I cannot tell you what her face looked like. I have been trying for six hours. I have been trying, if I am honest, for forty years.

This afternoon I hired a man with an automobile to drive me out to the section. I had not been back since 1875, the year I left for the railroad. The road was different — graveled now, county-maintained — but the land was the same land. You cannot change that land. You can plow it and plant it and fence it and name it and it remains what it was before you came, which is grass over everything, grass and wind, the grass moving in the wind like the hide of something alive and indifferent to your opinion of it.

The Vanek soddie is gone. I knew it would be. A sod house will stand fifteen, twenty years if the roof holds, and then the walls soften and the rain works through and it sinks back into itself. What remains is a depression — a shallow dish in the ground maybe sixteen by twenty feet, which is exactly the footprint of the house she built, because I watched her build it. There were compass plants growing at the edge of the depression, tall-stalked and rough-leaved, with their yellow flowers gone to seed heads at this time of year. I recognized them by the way the leaves stood, flat edges aimed north and south. Edith showed me that once, pointing with a hand that was cracked across every knuckle, saying nothing, just pointing, and I understood that the plant had figured out what we hadn’t, which was how to be on that prairie without the prairie killing you for it.

The path was still there. Barely. A faint line through the bluestem from where the door had been to where the well had been, maybe forty yards. Fifty years of grass growing over it and you could still see it — a crease, a depression no deeper than your thumb, the dirt packed by ten thousand trips to the well, her feet and her children’s feet wearing the ground bare with the daily need for water. The grass had almost covered it. Another ten years and it would be gone. But today it was there, and I walked it, and my feet knew the length of it before I counted the steps.

I am going to write down what I remember. I am going to do it now because I went to that place today and stood in the depression where her house had been and tried to see her face and could not, and I am afraid that if I sleep the visit will finish what time started and she will be gone entirely, and I will have nothing left of her but the motions of her hands, which is both everything and not enough.

The Falks — my family — arrived on the neighboring quarter-section in the spring of 1868, when I was twelve. My father had the notion that Nebraska was the future, which it was, but not the kind of future he meant. He meant wheat. He meant prosperity. What he got was a hundred and sixty acres of mixed-grass prairie, a five-year proving requirement, and a wind that did not stop. It started the day we arrived and it has not stopped. It is blowing now, outside this hotel, fifty-five years later. I can hear it pressing against the window glass.

The Vaneks were already there. They’d been on the claim two years, living in a dugout cut into the south side of a low ridge — a shelf of earth scooped out and shored up with cottonwood poles, a piece of canvas over the opening. It was a hole in the ground. They lived in it the way the prairie dogs lived in theirs, and they were not ashamed of it, and that was the first thing I learned about the Vaneks: they did not organize their lives around what other people thought of them.

Edith was building the new house the day I first saw her. She was cutting sod. She had a breaking plow borrowed from someone — I never knew who — and she had cut the prairie into strips and was slicing the strips into bricks with a flat spade. Each brick eighteen inches by twenty-four, about four inches thick. About fifty pounds. The sod had to be a particular dampness — wet enough that the roots held together, dry enough that the bricks didn’t sag when you stacked them. She tested each one with her thumb, pressing into the cut face, and the ones that were wrong she set aside without expression, the way you’d set aside a card from a hand you were dealing. The ones that were right she lifted with her hands and knees, carried them to the wall she was raising, and stacked them grass-side down. She did this with a rhythm that I understood, even at twelve, had been established over many hours and many days and would continue for many more. A house takes three thousand bricks. A hundred and fifty thousand pounds of earth, cut and carried and stacked by hand. She was alone. Josef was somewhere else — in town, or hunting, or sitting by the creek, which is where Josef often was when there was work to be done, though I did not understand this yet.

She did not look up when we passed. She was having a conversation with the earth and we were not part of it.

I want to say she was a large woman, but I am not sure that is accurate. She was a woman who took up space the way a plow horse takes up space, by the authority of what she could do. She had arms that were brown past the elbow and white above, where the sleeves covered, and the line between the brown and the white was sharp, like a border on a map. Her hair was dark and she kept it pulled back and covered, and her hands were the hands of someone who had been using them since before she could remember using anything. She was Bohemian — Czech, we would say now. She spoke English with an accent that turned her th’s into d’s and her w’s into v’s, and she did not speak often, and when she did the sentences were short and aimed at practical things: where to cut, what to save, when to stop.

I am describing her hands again. I am describing her arms and her voice and the way she moved. I am not describing her face because I cannot see it. It is a space in my memory where a face should be, and around that space are hands, arms, the sound of humming, the smell of lye soap, the motion of wringing a cloth. I have more of her body than I have of anyone’s body, and less of her face than I have of strangers I passed on the street in Omaha last Tuesday.

The hog came from Gunderson, who had more hogs than sense, my father said, though my father had less of both. It was an autumn day — 1870, I think, or ‘71; the years have run together like watercolors left in the rain — and the men were away. My father and Josef had gone to the Loup Fork for timber, though what Josef did when he got there was probably not cut timber. Edith and my mother butchered the hog alone, with me to help.

I was fourteen. I had butchered chickens. I had not butchered a hog. A hog is a different order of killing. You scald it in a trough of boiling water to loosen the hair, and the smell of the hot wet hair is a smell I have carried for fifty years, a thick sweet smell that is not quite rot and not quite cooking and not quite anything with a name. You scrape the bristles off with a knife, the blade going against the grain the way you’d scrape frost from a window, and the skin underneath is pale and strange, nothing like the living animal. You hang the carcass from a cottonwood limb and you open it and the weight of the guts is a thing you are not prepared for, no matter how many chickens you’ve dressed. They slide out hot and heavy and you catch them in a tub and they move in the tub like something that hasn’t been told it’s dead.

Edith worked with a sureness that made my mother better. My mother was a competent woman — she had to be, out there — but next to Edith she was tentative, and she knew it, and she did not resent it. She watched Edith’s hands and followed. Edith told her where to cut. Short sentences. Here. Along the bone. Save the liver separate. My mother did as she was told and for once in her life seemed happy to do so, because the instructions came from a kind of authority that did not require explanation or apology. Edith knew meat the way she knew sod. She knew it with her body.

They made headcheese from the skull. You boil the head — the whole head, with the eyes and the tongue and the brain — for hours, until the meat falls away from the bone in gray strips. Then you pick the meat out and chop it fine and press it with your fingers to find the small bones and the cartilage, and you mix it with vinegar and salt and a little sage if you have sage, and pour it into a mold and let it set overnight. The smell of a boiling hog’s head is the smell of a frontier kitchen in autumn — a heavy, mineral smell, tallow and bone and something underneath that is simply the smell of an animal becoming food. I have never encountered it since without being fourteen again, standing in Edith’s soddie with the walls sweating from the steam, watching two women work in a silence that was not empty but full in the way that a house is full when the people in it are doing what they are meant to do.

Edith talked more during the butchering than at any other time I knew her. Not much more. But she told my mother about her mother’s kitchen in Moravia, how they hung sausages from the ceiling beams in November and the kitchen smelled of paprika and woodsmoke until spring. She said this without sentiment, the way you might describe the route to town. My mother asked if she missed it. Edith said, “The pot,” and nothing else, and my mother nodded as if this were a complete answer, and it was a complete answer, and I understood nothing at all, and I have thought about that exchange for the rest of my life. Two women who understood that you could miss an object and mean a world.

I am telling you about the butchering as if I saw it yesterday, but I am telling it wrong. Memory does not preserve — it composes. I am making the light better than it was. I am making the rhythm of their work more graceful than it was. I am smoothing the blisters and forgetting the flies and turning two tired women cutting up a dead animal into something that means more than it did at the time. At the time it was work. It was a hog that needed to become food before the weather turned. It was November and their hands were cold and the fat under their fingernails would not come out for days.

But I cannot stop making it into something. That is my failure in this document, if this is a document, if this ledger book bought for fifteen cents is anything more than an old man in a hotel room refusing to sleep.

The blizzard was the winter of 1872. Or ‘73. I will say ‘72 because it does not matter and the weather keeps no calendar. I was sixteen and I had gone to the Vaneks’ to help bank straw around the soddie walls for insulation, and the sky came down. It came down all at once, the way it does out there — one hour the horizon is clear and sharp as a line drawn with a rule, and the next hour there is no horizon, just white, and the white has weight, and the white has sound, which is no sound, which is every sound compressed into a single roaring note that does not stop.

Three days. The snow buried the one window by the end of the first night. After that we lived in the dark, or near-dark — Edith made a lamp from a button and a rag and a saucer of bacon grease, the rag threaded through the buttonhole to make a wick, and it gave off a light about the size of your fist, a greasy orange light that turned the sod walls the color of old blood. By that light she moved among the children. There were five of them by then. Josef. Me. Eight bodies in a room sixteen by twenty feet, breathing the same air, the ceiling low enough that Josef could touch it with his palm, the dirt floor going damp from the melt seeping through the walls.

The children coughed. The youngest, Mila, who was not yet two, coughed in a way that sounded like tearing cloth, and Edith held her against her chest and the sound passed through both of them.

The fuel was gone by the second day. The twisted-hay chips my father had brought over were burned. The dried cow chips were burned. So we twisted fresh hay into knots — you take a handful of prairie hay and twist it tight, as tight as rope, bending it back on itself so it holds, and light the end, and it burns for maybe three minutes with a sweet thick smoke that fills the room and makes your eyes water and your throat close. Edith twisted hay without stopping. She twisted it the way she did everything — with a rhythm that made it seem less like labor and more like the action of some mechanism, steady and unquestioning. I twisted hay beside her and my hands cramped and blistered and I stopped to rest and she did not stop. She never stopped. I was sixteen and strong and she was perhaps thirty-one and thin and she did not stop.

Josef sat against the far wall. He had already begun the sitting that would become his life’s final work. He sat and he stared and his eyes were open and they were looking at something that was not in the room, something past the sod walls, past the snow, past whatever it is that breaks inside a man when the land he staked his name on turns out to be indifferent to the staking. His hands were folded in his lap like tools that had been retired. I did not understand it then. I understand it now, or I think I do: the land had gotten inside him the way the damp got inside the walls, and it had stopped something, and what was left was the shape of a man with the working part removed.

Edith did not speak to him during the blizzard. She moved around him the way water moves around a stone — without comment, without resentment that I could see, just the fact of his stillness and her motion and the space between them. She touched each child’s forehead with the back of her hand. She hummed — a song I never learned the name of, something Bohemian, something in a minor key that went nowhere and resolved nothing and did not need to. The melody circled. It came back to where it started and went around again, the way the trips to the well went, the way everything on that prairie went around and around until it stopped. I fell asleep to that humming on the dirt floor and woke to it hours later and she was still humming, still moving, and the fire she was feeding with hay knots was the only warm thing in the territory.

She did not stop because stopping was not available to her. A woman with five children in a buried soddie with no fuel and no light and a husband who has already left in every way except his body — that woman does not have the option of sitting against the wall. That option belonged to Josef and she let him have it, the way she let him have the only chair, the way she let him have his silence, and she kept moving.

Mila died in January. I will not say which January because I find I do not want to locate it precisely, as if leaving the date uncertain might leave the fact uncertain too, which it cannot, which I know.

My mother made broth — boiled bones with an onion and the last of the salt — and sent me with it in a pot wrapped in a cloth. The walk from our soddie to theirs was four hundred yards. I walked it in the cold and the pot was warm against my chest and the sky was the pale blue of a day that has nothing in it, no cloud, no warmth, no charity, nothing between you and the sun and the sun is useless to you.

The door was ajar. I pushed it open. The light inside was the brown light of a soddie in winter — the sod walls sweating slightly with the difference between the cold outside and the stove heat inside, the one window letting in a rectangle of that pale useless blue.

Edith was sitting at the table with Mila in her lap. Mila was dead. I knew this without being told because of the way Edith was holding her, which was the way you hold something that will never need to be adjusted, never need to be shifted from one hip to the other, never need to be put down. A hold without purpose or destination. She was not crying. She was not rocking. She was not doing anything. She was sitting. For the first time in the years I had known her, she was not in motion.

I stood in the doorway for a minute. Maybe longer. I have thought about that minute more than any other minute of my life. I stood there holding a pot of broth and looking at a woman holding a dead child and neither of us moved and the light came through the window and fell across the table and did not reach her.

Then she looked up. And her face — this is the face I cannot remember, the one I have been trying to find for six hours in this hotel room — her face was something I had no word for then and have no word for now. It was not grief. Grief has a shape, a known architecture — you have seen grief and you can recognize it when you see it again. This was not that. It was not anger. It was not the blankness people assume when they are protecting themselves from what they feel. It was the face of a woman who had been seen at a moment when she believed she was not being seen, and the thing on her face was not for me and it was not for Mila and it was not for Josef, who was gone by then — walked away one morning in the thaw without a word, just gone, the way a fence post rots at the base and stands and stands and then one day is lying in the grass and you cannot say when it fell. Edith had said nothing about his leaving to anyone. Not then, not ever. The silence around his departure was as total as the silence inside the soddie where her daughter was dead in her lap.

I set the broth on the table. She said, “Thank you, Arlo.” Her voice was the same voice she used to say here, along the bone, save the liver separate. A voice for practical things. A voice that had decided, probably long before this day, that all things were practical, that holding a dead child in a sod house in Nebraska in January was a practical matter and she would sit with it until the sitting was done.

I did not love her. That is a sentence I have written and crossed out three times in this ledger. I will let it stand because it is a lie I need on the page so I can see its shape and know that it is wrong. What I felt watching Edith Vanek was something the language I have is not built for. I was small next to it. She was not the thing itself — she was a woman cutting sod and boiling skulls and twisting hay — but the feeling was large, and I have never fit it inside a word.

She planted onions. Every spring, after the ground thawed and could be worked, she planted onions in a row so straight it looked like something a man with surveying instruments had laid out. I asked her once how she got the line so true. She said she used a piece of string. That was all. A piece of string staked at both ends and pulled taut. And the onions came up in a line that was the only straight thing on that whole quarter-section of rolling grass and crooked creek bed, the only thing that said a human hand had been here and imposed an order, however small, however temporary. The grass did not grow in lines. The wind did not blow in lines. The creeks did not run in lines. But Edith’s onions grew in a line because she had decided they would, and the land allowed it, for a season, and then the season turned and the line was gone and she planted it again.

She sat on the bucket every evening. An overturned wooden bucket outside the soddie door, and she sat on it for five or ten minutes before the light went, and she watched the grass. Just sat. Not mending, not shelling beans into a tin pail, not wringing, not twisting hay, not carrying water, not feeding children, not butchering, not cutting sod. Just sitting. Watching the grass move.

I saw her do this hundreds of times. I saw it when I was thirteen and thought nothing of it. I saw it when I was sixteen and watched her from across the grass and felt something I did not have a name for. I saw it when I was nineteen, the day I left for the railroad, walking away from the claims with my pack on my back, and I looked over my shoulder and she was on the bucket, a small figure against the grass and the sky, and the grass was moving and she was still, and I almost turned back. I did not turn back. I kept walking. I have kept walking for forty-eight years.

I never asked her what she was thinking.

I never asked what she thought about when the work stopped and the children were inside and the light was going and the grass moved and she sat on the bucket with her hands in her lap — those hands that I can see right now, every crack, every callus, the split nail on her left thumb that never healed properly — I never asked and she never said and whatever she thought belongs to her. It is the one private thing she had. The land took the rest. The land took the soddie and the garden and the fence posts and the onion rows and the path to the well. The land took Josef, in its way, hollowed him out and sent the husk walking. The land took Mila. It took everything that could be taken from a woman who had nothing that was not also functional. But it did not take those minutes on the bucket, because those minutes were not on the land. They were somewhere else. They were wherever Edith went when she was not working, which was a place I was not invited to and did not have the sense to ask about.

I went back today and the compass plants were there. Their leaves pointed north and south, the way they have pointed for longer than any person has been on that ground. A compass plant can live a hundred years. The root goes down fifteen feet into the earth and draws water from places we cannot reach. It does not care about the Homestead Act or the difference between Pawnee land and Bohemian want.

The path was there — the desire line from the house to the well, forty yards of beaten ground, the record of ten thousand trips with a bucket. Edith’s feet. Her children’s feet. My feet on the days I carried water for them. And the grass has almost covered it. Another decade and the grass will close over the last crease and there will be nothing to show that anyone wanted anything here, that anyone carried anything anywhere.

I stood in the depression where the house had been. Sixteen by twenty feet. I could feel the edges of it through my shoes — a slight step down, no more than six inches, into the ghost of a room. I closed my eyes and tried to see her face — not the face at the table with Mila, not any particular face, just her face, the daily one, the face she wore cutting sod or hanging wash or humming in the dark while the children coughed and the hay burned sweet. Just her ordinary face. The face of a Tuesday. The face of a woman carrying water.

Nothing.

I can see the hands. I can see the arms, brown to the elbow, white above. I can see the motion of wringing the cloth. I can hear the humming — that circular Bohemian melody that resolved nothing. I can smell the headcheese and the boiling skull and the lye soap and the wet sod walls in a thaw. But the face is gone. It sank back into the earth the way the soddie sank back, and what remains is eleven pages in a ledger book that cost fifteen cents, and a path from a door to a well that the grass has almost covered.

It is after three in the morning. My hand aches from the wrist to the second knuckle. Outside, the wind has not stopped. It is the same wind that blew through the soddie walls and made the hay-knot fire gutter and lean, the same wind that Edith sat in every evening on her bucket, the same wind that carried Josef wherever Josef went when he walked away.

I watched her work for seven years and I called it seeing her. I watched her cut three thousand sod bricks and carry a hundred and fifty thousand pounds of earth and I called that knowing her. I watched her butcher and plant and twist hay and wring cloth and carry water and bury a child and sit still with the dead weight of that child in her lap, and I was paying attention, but I was paying attention to the labor and not to the woman, and the labor is what I have left, and the woman is what I lost, and I do not know if there is a difference or if the labor was the woman or if the woman was something else entirely that I never saw because I was too busy admiring what her hands could do.

She sat on the bucket. The grass moved. She thought something I will never know.

I am putting down the pencil. Not because I am finished — this is not the kind of thing that finishes, only the kind that stops.