There was darkness, the creaks and thumps that a house makes at night, wind in the branches, tapping. The big door closed at the end of the hall. Later, after Karl and I were sent to bed, I stayed awake and listened to the grown-up's voices rise and tangle, then fall, first in the downstairs parlor and then, muffled, in the dining room. His voice was deep pitched, but I liked the sound of it in counterpoint to or covering my mother's. "For your hair, Little Miss," he said, pulling a green satin ribbon from his vest pocket. Karl posed on the horsehair sofa and pretended a fascination with the red diamonds woven into the carpet. Ober arrived, we sat with him in the parlor. "You didn't get this from me," she said at last, letting the hair fall limp and black about my shoulders. I closed my eyes and listened to the numbers. She wound and pinned her dark red braid into a crown, and then brushed my hair one hundred light, even strokes. Ober came to visit, she put on the blue silk dress and the necklace of sparkling stones that we knew had come from him. It was like a change of weather in our house. Ober's visits, but I looked forward to each one because my mother always brightened. Two or three times a week he appeared, in the late evenings, and parked his automobile in the barn. He owned a whole county of Minnesota wheatland. Ober, a tall man with a carefully trimmed black beard. There was something different about us even then. There were just us three: Karl and me and our mother, Adelaide. This story starts then, because before that and without the year 1929, our family would probably have gone on living comfortably in a lonely and isolated white house on the edge of Prairie Lake. I was the one who begged spotted apples from the grocery store and stole whey from the back stoop of the creamery in Minneapolis, where we were living the winter after my father died.
My mother called him delicate, but I was the opposite. He suffered from fevers that kept him in a stuporous dream state and was sensitive to loud sounds, harsh lights.
Karl was taller than me but spindly, older of course, but fearful. With no one to protect and look out for, I was weak. It was not that with Karl gone I had no one to protect me, but just the opposite. When it was out of sight, I stared down at my feet. I saw the train pulled like a string of black beads over the horizon, as I have seen it so many times since. The only difference would be the fragrant stick blooming in his hand.
That was when I realized Karl had probably jumped back on the same boxcar and was now hunched in straw, watching out the opened door. I was the girl in the stiff coat.Īfter I ran blind and came to a halt, shocked not to find Karl behind me, I looked up to watch for him and heard the train whistle long and shrill.
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