What the Season Requires

They came in April, which was the first lie the land told them. April on the Dakota grass was open sky and ground soft enough to cut, a mild wind carrying the smell of thaw and wet earth, and the railroad pamphlet had said Rich Prairie Loam — Crops Practically Raise Themselves and in April you could almost believe it. The grass stood waist-high in places, bluestem and switchgrass moving in long slow waves that looked like something breathing. Nels Erickson looked at the quarter-section the land agent had marked with four cedar stakes and he said to his wife, “We’ll put the house there,” pointing to a low rise where the ground drained south, and Alma nodded, and neither of them said what a house meant here, which was dirt.

They had come from Decorah, Iowa, which was already frontier but had trees. Lumber. Alma’s father’s house had glass windows, two of them, and a plank floor. She did not think about the windows. She was looking at grass and thinking about water.

The children were Lena, six, Peder, four, and the baby, Kirsten, eleven months, who rode on Alma’s hip in a sling made from a flour sack that Alma had sewn on the train. The baby’s weight had become so familiar that Alma sometimes reached for her hip when the child was sleeping in the wagon and felt the absence as a physical wrongness, a limb gone numb and then not there at all.

Nels cut the first sod on the second day. A breaking plow borrowed from Torsten Haugen, seven miles south, the only other claim within walking distance. The plow turned strips three inches thick and twelve inches wide, heavy as flagstone, held together by the root mat that had been building since before anyone on this ground had a name for it. He cut and Alma stacked. The strips weighed thirty, forty pounds each, and by the end of the first day Alma’s forearms had seized into shapes that would not straighten, and she sat on the wagon tongue holding her own hands like objects she’d found and didn’t know what to do with.

“We need four hundred,” Nels said. He had done the arithmetic on the train, in the margins of the pamphlet. Sixteen by twenty feet, walls three feet thick, seven feet high. Four hundred sod bricks, give or take.

“Then we cut four hundred.”

It took nine days. The soddie went up with no sound but the wet thump of brick on brick, the children playing in the turned earth where worms surfaced in confusion. Alma set the door frame — real lumber, shipped from Sioux Falls at a cost that ate a third of what they’d brought — and Nels cut a window opening in the south wall and covered it with a piece of oiled muslin that let in light the color of old butter. Inside, the house smelled like the ground it was made of, because it was the ground it was made of.

They had: forty pounds of flour. Twelve pounds of salt pork. Coffee. Sugar, six pounds. Dried apples, a sack of. Seed potatoes. Seed corn. Two chickens in a crate that Peder had named, which Alma told him not to do. A milk cow they did not have. A well they had not dug.

Nels dug the well in May, twelve feet before he hit water, clay-heavy and tasting of iron. Good enough. He lined it with fieldstone hauled from a creek bed two miles east, and Alma thought two miles for stone, seven miles for a neighbor, forty for a mill, and the pamphlet said abundant water. She did not say this. There was no profit in saying it.

The garden went in where the sod had been stripped: potatoes, turnips, beans, a row of onions from sets she’d carried in her apron pocket from Decorah. The soil was black and loose, like the pamphlet promised, but the wind came in June, and the wind did not care about your onions. It came from the northwest, forty miles of open grass with nothing to break it, and it pulled moisture from the ground and from the plants and from the wash on the line and from the skin of Alma’s face until her lips cracked and bled and she pressed them together and tasted iron, the same as the well water, as if everything here was the same substance wearing different shapes.

Lena had a cough in June that settled in her chest and did not leave until July. Alma made a poultice from mustard and flour and laid it on the girl’s back at night, and Lena screamed at the heat of it and then fell asleep, and Alma sat on the dirt floor next to the straw tick and listened to the child breathe and counted breaths the way she counted flour — the arithmetic of what was left.

Nels had a song he sang when he worked, a Norwegian hymn his mother had taught him, something about a valley and a river and the mercy of God, and he sang it tunelessly and constantly, the same four lines, over and over, until the song was not a song anymore but a sound his body made, like breathing or the click of his jaw when he chewed. Alma had stopped hearing it months ago. She could not have told you the words if you’d asked. But if he’d stopped singing she would have noticed the silence the way you notice when rain stops — not the quiet itself but the absence of the sound you’d organized your thinking around. She heard it again one evening in late June when the light stayed until nine and the wind dropped and the grass stood still, and Nels was splitting kindling by the south wall, singing, and Lena was sitting in the doorway holding Kirsten on her lap, bouncing the baby on her knees, and Peder was throwing dirt clods at a fencepost he’d stuck in the ground, and for about a minute the whole thing looked like the picture in the pamphlet.

Then the wind came back and the baby cried and Alma went inside to start supper, which was beans and salt pork, the same as yesterday, the same as tomorrow.

The grasshoppers came in August. They came from the west like weather, a darkening that was not cloud, and they landed on everything — the garden, the soddie roof, the children’s hair, the wash, the well cover, the ground, each other. The sound of them was a sound Alma would never have language for. Not buzzing. Not clicking. A sound like the earth chewing itself.

They ate the beans first, then the turnip greens, then the onion tops. They did not eat the potatoes because the potatoes were underground, and Alma thought at least the potatoes and held that thought like a coin in her fist, something small and hard that might still buy a day.

Nels stood in the garden with a blanket, beating at the ground, and the hoppers rose and settled and rose and settled and he beat the blanket until his shoulders gave and then he dropped it and stood there and Alma watched him from the doorway and saw the exact moment he stopped fighting something and started absorbing it, the way the soddie walls absorbed rain — slowly, all the way through, until the inside and the outside were the same temperature.

“The potatoes might still come up,” she said.

“They might.”

Peder was holding a grasshopper in his fist, studying it with the serious attention of a boy who had not yet learned that some things are not interesting but only terrible. “It’s got teeth,” he said.

“Put it down,” Alma said.

“It’s biting me.”

“Put it down, Peder.”

He opened his hand. The hopper sat on his palm for a moment, working its mandibles, and then flew — not away, just sideways, to the next stalk of whatever was left — and Peder looked at the red mark on his palm and said, “It didn’t hurt,” in a voice that meant it did.

September brought cool nights and the hoppers thinned. The potatoes came up: small, hard, enough to fill two bushel sacks. Alma counted them. Forty-seven pounds. She did the arithmetic in her head, the way she always did the arithmetic, because the arithmetic was the only part of this life that held still long enough to be trusted. Forty-seven pounds of potatoes. Four mouths. Call it a pound a day with the salt pork stretched and the flour going and whatever Nels could shoot — prairie chicken, rabbit, once a pronghorn that fed them for a week and that Alma boiled and fried and roasted and finally rendered into a soup so thin it was more memory than food.

Torsten Haugen came by in October with a haunch of venison and news. He rode a sorrel mare that was too good for him, a horse he’d won in a card game in Yankton before he’d found religion, and he always apologized for the horse as if its quality were a moral failing. He tied it to the fencepost Peder used for target practice and sat at the table that wobbled and drank the coffee Alma offered and held the cup in both hands the way men do when they’ve been cold for long enough that warmth is not a comfort but a need.

The Nilssons, north of his place, had quit. Gone back to Minnesota. Couldn’t face another winter. The Dahl family, twelve miles west — the woman had died in childbirth in September and the man had buried her behind the soddie and then loaded the children and driven east and nobody had seen him since.

“February,” Torsten said. He was a big man with a beard that started at his cheekbones and a way of speaking that suggested he’d measured every word for weight before allowing it out. “February is the one that matters.”

He looked at Nels when he said it, but it was Alma’s question, and they all knew it. In a soddie with three children and a winter coming, the question of whether you could stay was not the man’s question. The man worked. The woman decided.

He left the venison and rode out and Alma hung it in the root cellar Nels had dug into the north wall and she thought about February and what it would tell her and whether she wanted to hear it.

November. Nels had cut hay all through September and October — bluestem, dried and stacked against the north wall of the soddie in a rick eight feet high. He’d also cut and stacked cow chips from the buffalo wallow two miles west, dried discs of dung that burned slow and hot and smelled like what they were. There was no wood. The nearest timber was the creek bed where he’d found the wellstones, cottonwood and box elder, and he’d hauled what he could, but what he could haul in a handcart over two miles of open grass was not enough to heat a sod house through a Dakota winter.

Alma made a list. She made it in her head because paper was scarce and she had decided that certain things were too important to trust to paper, which could burn or get wet or blow away. The list: twenty-three pounds of flour. Forty-one pounds of potatoes. Salt pork, the last of it. Coffee, maybe a pound. Sugar, gone. The dried apples were gone. They had the venison. They had two chickens who laid fitfully, stunned by the cold into a productivity that could not be counted on.

Kirsten was walking now — not well, a stagger that covered the distance between Alma’s knees and the wall in four unsteady steps — and she had four teeth and a way of laughing that sounded like water over stones, and Alma heard that laugh and picked the child up and held her and did not name what she felt because naming was another form of counting and she had counted enough.

In December Kirsten got the fever. It came on a Tuesday. Alma noticed the heat in the child’s skin when she picked her up from the straw tick in the morning, a dry burning heat that was wrong, that belonged to summer, not to this body in this season. She bathed the child in well water that was so cold it steamed against the skin. She kept the fire. She did not sleep for two nights. Nels took the older children to sleep in the hay rick, wrapped in every blanket they had, and came in at intervals to feed the fire and to stand by the tick and look down at his daughter in the way a man looks at something he cannot fix with his hands.

Kirsten died on Thursday morning. The fever did not break. It climbed until the child was still, and then it left, and what it left was not Kirsten but the weight of her, which was the same weight Alma had carried on her hip since Iowa, the weight she reached for when it was not there. Nels dug the grave behind the soddie where the ground was softest, the root mat thinnest, and Alma wrapped the child in the flour-sack sling and they buried her and Lena stood at the edge of the hole with her hands at her sides and Peder asked when Kirsten was coming back and nobody answered him.

The next morning Alma set the table for five. She counted the plates and picked up the fifth and held it. Then she washed it and dried it and put it on the shelf and the shelf had nothing else on it.

The chores did not stop. The fire needed feeding. The well needed drawing. The animals needed what animals need regardless of what has happened inside a house. Alma did the chores because the chores were there, and the next thing after that, and the next thing after that.

February.

The hay was gone. Nels twisted grass into braids and burned them, and the braids lasted forty minutes each and he could twist five an hour, and the arithmetic meant he spent every waking hour twisting grass to stay twelve braids ahead of the fire, his hands bleeding at the creases where the rough stems cut, the blood freezing on his knuckles when he went outside for more grass, which he cut with a knife because the scythe was too slow.

Alma heated water and brought it to him in the basin and he put his hands in and neither of them said anything. The steam rose between them. His hands in the water were a ruin — the knuckles split, the nails cracked to the quick, the calluses from the breaking plow overlaid by new cuts from the grass stems, the whole history of the year written in his palms. Alma looked at those hands and did not think about what they had been. She thought about whether they would hold a plow in April.

Outside the wind was the only sound, a sound so constant it had become silence, the way Nels’s song had become silence. They had stopped hearing the wind the way they had stopped hearing each other, not because there was nothing to hear but because hearing required a surplus of attention that survival had consumed.

Peder, who was five now, said at breakfast — breakfast being a potato split four ways and fried in the last of the pork fat — “Is it spring yet?”

“No.”

“When is it spring?”

“When the ground softens.”

“When does the ground soften?”

Alma looked at her son and saw her own face in his, the same jaw, the same pale eyes that had come from her father in Decorah. “When it’s ready,” she said.

Lena, seven now, who had learned to do sums by counting potatoes and to read from the one book they’d brought — a Bible with a cracked spine and her grandmother’s name on the flyleaf — said, “Fourteen.”

“Fourteen what?”

“Potatoes left.”

Alma looked at her daughter. “How do you know that?”

“I counted.”

Fourteen potatoes. Four people. At one potato a day split four ways, that was fourteen days, which put them into March, which was not spring, which was still weeks from the ground softening, from anything changing.

“Fourteen is enough,” Alma said.

She did not know if it was enough. The sentence was not a belief. It was a brick laid in the dark.

March came in as wind. Alma had stopped counting the potatoes because Lena counted them now, reporting each morning with a seriousness that belonged to someone older. Twelve. Eleven. Nine. Nels shot a rabbit and they ate it in a single meal, the four of them around the table Nels had built from the shipping crate the door frame had come in, a table that wobbled because one leg was shorter, which Nels had fixed with a folded piece of the railroad pamphlet, the one that said Rich Prairie Loam, and this detail — the pamphlet as a shim, the promise wedged under a table leg to keep the surface level — was not something Alma noticed anymore. She had stopped noticing it the way she had stopped noticing the absence of glass, which was not forgetting but adjustment, the daily imperceptible lowering of the picture in her head until the picture matched what she had, and she called it home, and the word was sufficient.

The first Saturday of March the wind shifted south. Alma felt it before she understood it — a difference in the pressure against the oiled muslin, a softness in the air that came through the gaps around the door frame. She went outside and the sky was the same grey it had been since November but the wind was different. It was not warm. Forty degrees is not warm. But it was not the wind that had been trying to come through the walls all winter, the wind that carried the sound of everything empty and moving.

Nels came out and stood next to her. His hands were wrapped in strips of flour sack that Alma changed every morning, the cuts from the hay braids healing slowly, the skin underneath new and pink and too thin for what would be asked of it in a month when the breaking plow came out again.

“South wind,” he said.

“I felt it.”

She looked at the grass, which was brown and flat and dead-looking, and she knew it was not dead, that under the surface the root mat was doing what it had done for ten thousand years, and that in six weeks the green would come up through the brown the way the well water came up through the clay, slowly and tasting of iron.

Lena came to the door, leaning against the frame with her arms crossed the way Alma crossed hers, a gesture the girl had borrowed without knowing it, and said, “Seven.”

“Seven potatoes.”

“Seven.”

Alma went inside. She took the water bucket from the peg by the door and walked the forty yards to the well, the path worn into the ground by her own feet over eleven months, a crease in the earth that would be there long after the soddie sank back into the grass and the grass grew over whatever this was. She lowered the bucket on the rope Nels had spliced from hay twine and waited for the sound of it hitting the water, the hollow wooden knock that meant the well had not frozen, that there was still something down there. When it came she hauled the bucket up hand over hand, the rope rough against her palms, the water sloshing cold over the rim, and carried it back to the house where the fire needed feeding.