20
1890
Matilda wouldn’t let Maud get up until a full fourteen days of convalescence had passed, so day after day, Maud lay in the front upstairs bedroom with stacks of inventories, IOUs, and bills of sale surrounding her on the covers. Frank had brought them to her, all jumbled up in a crate, asking if she wouldn’t mind taking a look. As she pieced them together, Maud started to see what had happened. As times had gotten harder, Frank had extended credit to cash-strapped farmers and had collected on fewer IOUs. Finally, it had caught up with him, and there was no money left to pay the bank.
After Maud spent a while poring over these sad records of the store’s declining income, her neat rows of figures revealed the truth: Baum’s Bazaar was doomed. Selling all of the inventory would settle their bank loan and leave them a bit of money to spare. Enough, Maud hoped, for Frank to figure out another line of work—although what this would be was not evident. Frank’s business was not the only casualty of the hard times. The local economy was in a tailspin after the failed wheat harvest. People were selling their belongings at cut rates and leaving town. Aberdeen’s booming prosperity of the previous year was over.
“You are adept with a printing press,” Matilda told her son-in-law one evening when they were all in the parlor. “I’ve seen how you hand-printed those advertisements, and many of them were clever.”
“But what good is a printing press if I’ve no goods to advertise?” Frank said.
“I’ve heard that John Drake is giving up and returning to Syracuse. He is looking to sell off his newspaper at a bargain price.”
“A newspaper?” Frank said, lowering the paper he was currently reading, unlit pipe stuck between his teeth, legs draped over the arms of the upholstered chair. “There are seven daily newspapers in Aberdeen right now. Two Democrat, one Republican-leaning,” he went on, tapping the paper he held with his finger. “One staunch Republican, one for the Farmers’ Alliance, one for the Knights of Labor, and one that seems to have no purpose for existing whatsoever. If there’s anything Aberdeen has too many of right now, it’s newspapers. I’m full up on hobbies. I’m looking for a moneymaking concern.”
Even as down-spirited as he was, Frank managed to make this long speech sound halfway cheerful. Matilda was not deterred by his pessimism.
“Nobody writes anything of interest to ladies,” Matilda said. “You need to write about education and the health of children, and the suffrage cause.”
“And parties and social gatherings,” Maud added. “You’ll have the wives asking to subscribe.”
TWO WEEKS LATER, Frank put out the first issue of his new newspaper, which he had christened The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. Eager to redeem himself, Frank had dived into his new business with a fervor. He was out the door early every morning and didn’t come back until late into the evening. The work seemed to suit him; after several months, however, the emerging financial picture was less rosy. From the first day, Frank had struggled to keep up subscriptions, but Maud remained optimistic. Everyone said that once the spring came and the rains started up, a single wheat crop would put everyone in the black again.
But the summer of 1890 showed no change in the weather, and a curse seemed to have fallen upon the new state of South Dakota. Rapacious bankers foreclosed on farms and businesses. A steady stream of Aberdonians were giving up and leaving town. With each family that departed, a part of the economy departed with them. The baseball team disbanded when most of the players left town to look for work. Frank kept up a steady drumbeat of positive boosterism for the town in his editorials. Still, everyone knew that one more failed harvest would drive the town to the brink of extinction.
Maud received few letters from Julia, but she knew that if times were hard in town, they would be doubly so on the homestead. Although she thought of Magdalena constantly, her pride prevented her from approaching her sister again about sending the girl to Aberdeen. She had not gotten over the shock of learning that her sister had expected her to die in childbirth. Still, she waited, and hoped that in such hard times, Julia might at last relent.
The Baum family could not control the weather, so they threw their energy into the upcoming vote for women’s suffrage. The big day—November 4, 1890—was when the voters of South Dakota would decide whether or not they should strike the word “male” from the suffrage plank, giving women the right to vote. Maud had stuffed envelopes, embroidered banners, baked cookies for socials, and donated her fine lace to the white elephant sales. Frank penned pro-suffrage editorials and served as secretary of Aberdeen’s Women’s Suffrage Club. Enough was enough. Women needed to win the vote!
By now, Matilda was traveling all over the state to canvass in tiny towns and on lonely farms. As the vote approached, Frank worked himself into a fever pitch of excitement, convinced that this one thing, this one single thing, could turn the tide of misfortune that had beset Aberdeen. The South Dakotans were going to embrace women’s suffrage, and then, magically unfolding from this one great event, the rains would come and the town would bounce back, and all would be well.
Maud waited up on the nights when he came back late from the printing press, now smeared with ink, as he’d been forced to let the typesetter go to save money. With fewer subscriptions, Frank worked just as hard for a third less money. Maud had been scrimping on everything.
She guarded these quiet evening hours when the children were in bed and Frank was not yet home. With the three children, Maud felt as if she never got a moment’s peace. This day had been particularly trying—baby Harry was teething, and Robin and Bunting had done nothing but squabble all day. When at last all three boys were settled, the dishes washed and put away, and she had finished sweeping up, Maud collapsed gratefully into an armchair and picked up a novel. Soon she was carried away to the Scottish Highlands, forgetting her cares for a moment.
Unfortunately, the blissful interlude was short-lived. As soon as Frank burst in the door, his words came out in a torrent. Although Maud loved Frank dearly, right now she wanted to steal a few more quiet moments before heading up to bed, and she hoped that more conversation could wait until the morning. She had never expected to miss those long, peaceful hours she had once spent in the Sage Library, her books lined up next to her, lost in a Shakespeare play or an epic poem, but now she sometimes wished she had a place like that to slip away to, where no one would interrupt her while she read.
“Hello, darling,” she murmured as he stooped down to kiss her on the cheek. She smiled, tapped on her book, and said, “I’m just going to read for a few more minutes.” Frank, however, seemed to have been storing up speeches all day, and, undeterred, he prattled nonstop as he took off his hat and scarf.
“You see, Maud,” he went on, “people just need to have a little bit of imagination. The problem of rain seems insurmountable now, but there is enough water in the James River to irrigate a hundred thousand acres, and the technology already exists to do it—artesian wells. And it’s not just wells. The world is changing so quickly. We’re just ten years away from the twentieth century, and the pace of technology is moving along so fast—faster than the speed of our imaginations. See what the iron horse did to this part of the world? Imagine that soon the iron horse might fly through the air like a mighty iron Pegasus! Machines will till the fields! Farmers can just stroll down Main Street, stop for a shave, and return home to find a silo full to the top. You remember why we came here, Maud? It was promise. It was a blank slate. It was a town to build the right way from the ground up, where men and women are equal citizens, so there’s double the energy to get things done.”
“Perhaps we don’t need to solve all this tonight?” Maud kept her eyes on her book.
“This is the turning point, my dear!” Frank exclaimed, so dramatically that Maud looked up and studied him. What was agitating him so? He was making a rapid whirling motion with his hands, as if he were responsible for the spinning of the world itself. His gray eyes were almost black, and the whites of his eyes flashed in the dim room. He ran his fingers through his hair, making it stand up like a lion’s mane. The heels of his shoes tapped furiously as he paced the floor.
“The vote will save us! Mark my words, darling! In three years, we’ll most likely be up to ten thousand subscriptions and wondering why we don’t have more. All we’ve got to do is have a little imagination. Why can’t the citizens of this one-horse town do as I do? Why can’t they push the curtain aside and peer just a little bit into the future?”
Maud tried to quiet her growing feeling of impatience. She had snapped at the boys several times today, and she feared that soon she would snap at Frank, too. Reluctantly, she placed a bookmark between the pages and looked up at him. His eyes were feverishly bright. He paced back and forth in the small parlor, gesticulating wildly. There was a dark ink smudge on his left cheek.
“I don’t know, Frank dear,” Maud said soothingly, hoping to calm him so that she could return to her book. “Why don’t you sit here by the fire for a moment. I’m sure we will not solve all of Aberdeen’s problems, nor secure the vote for women, this very night.”
“November 4, 1890,” Frank said, ignoring her suggestion. “Once women have the vote, they will vote sensibly, my dear Maud, as you would do, and Aberdeen will be set on a right path to the future.”
“Frank.” Maud was growing exasperated. “We all hope to see women win the vote, but the success of the movement is far from certain. This is your first time dabbling in these waters. Just think of it: Mother and her friends have been working for this all their lives and have yet to see it come to pass. You have to be patient.”
Although Maud was familiar with Frank’s flights of fancy, she worried to see him so keyed up, so certain that this one thing would change the tide of fortune. The lesson she had learned from her mother’s activism was that votes for women were astonishingly hard to obtain, for the simple reason that not a single member of the fairer sex could vote her own enfranchisement into law.
“Patient! Maud, tell me you are not suggesting that we be patient! Patient while the crops burn and the banks fail and farms are foreclosed and people leave town and the dream—the great American dream—the great promise that a person can make his own way—or her own way—unencumbered—burns along with it? How can we be patient?”
“You want to talk to me about patience, Lyman Frank Baum? How about you come home and spend a day in my shoes? You want to cook and clean and sweep and mend and count out pennies to every merchant? You want to make peace among the children and put salves on their sore gums and rock the baby on your hip all day? Don’t talk to me about patience! How long do you think we mothers will have to wait to get our fair share of ‘the dream,’ as you call it? Why, we can’t even vote!”
Frank suddenly looked weary, his face gray, dark bags puffed under his eyes, where once his skin had been youthfully smooth. He sank into a chair near the fire.
“Please, let’s not fight, Maudie.”
“This is not a fight, Frank. This is me stating my opinion about something I know a great deal about.”
Maud picked up her book, opened it pointedly, and scanned a few words. But the mood was now broken.
“When I was at Cornell, I had nothing to do but read books all day,” Maud said. “I chose a different life, and you don’t hear me complaining about it, do you?” She snapped her book shut, stood up, walked across the room, pulled back the hearth screen, and dropped the novel into the flames. Frank stood up, his eyes wide in horror.
“Maud? What on earth? You’re burning a book?”
She spun around and looked at him furiously. “I’m a woman. Why should I read? I might be happier if I couldn’t! At least then I wouldn’t be able to read the newspapers when they report that men have once again refused to give women the vote!”
Frank stared into the grate as the book’s leaves separated and their edges lit up orange with flames, then looked back at Maud, dumbfounded.
Maud glared back at him, put her finger over her lips, and said, “Don’t you dare say a word!” She turned and marched up the stairs, leaving Frank alone in the middle of the room as the odor of the burning leather binding filled the air. She heard his voice, calling halfheartedly up the stairs behind her, “Don’t be ridiculous, Maud. Of course women will win the vote.”
SUFFRAGE FOR THE WOMEN of South Dakota lost by a landslide, garnering only twenty-two thousand brave men’s votes in favor, with forty-six thousand opposed. When the final tallies came in, the mood in the Baum household was bleak. For her own part, Maud was disappointed but not surprised. She had watched this cycle of hope and disappointment play out so many times in her life. Frank and her mother, however, were devastated. Matilda had stayed in the capital, Pierre, while the vote was counted. When she returned, she was uncharacteristically quiet. She sat all day with her Key to Theosophy book in her lap, reading meditatively, and Frank seemed deeply depressed. The agitation, the feverish energy, the flights of fancy that had propelled him through the last few months, were gone. He ducked into the house late in the evening, strangely quiet. He was gaunt, and the bags under his eyes had become a permanent feature. At night in bed, he turned his back to her. For the first time since their marriage started, she felt him pulling away.
“Frank, darling,” she whispered to him late one night. “Where have you gone?”
There was no answer.
Frank began sleeping in, and he didn’t go into the newspaper office until midday. At night, he hunched over a pad of paper until late, filling reams of pages with his writings. As she tried to fall asleep, Maud could hear the furious scratching of his pen, but she dared not interrupt him, as he would simply look up at her with a dazed expression and then go on with his writing.
In the mornings, he took to lounging about in his dressing gown, drinking coffee and reading the Chicago newspapers, quoting snippets aloud to Maud, bothering her as she tried to keep up with her daily housework. Her mother, meanwhile, did nothing but read and correspond with members of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Every day, the post brought dozens of letters—some from women who were leaders in the movement, others from the group’s rank and file. Matilda speared each letter with her silver letter opener, sat reading and clucking in dismay, and then carefully penned her responses. With Mother and Frank underfoot, it was even harder for Maud to get her work done, and she wished that one of them, either of them, would find some occupation outside of the house.
One morning, she was in the kitchen kneading bread when Frank called through the doorway: “The Columbian Exhibition is going to bring the future right to our doorstep. They are planning the biggest electrical exhibition in history. Pretty soon, you’ll be loafing off and a machine will knead that bread for you. Do you realize how much all of this will change the world? But the people in Aberdeen just don’t care.”
Maud noted the new, bitter tone to his voice.
Frank kept writing, more and more feverishly, burning the kerosene lamp until the wick went low and the light sputtered out. Maud had stopped reading his editorials, but she sensed that he was using the newspaper now, more and more, as a place to express his feelings, his strong views about everything: about the coming of technology, the fate of the town. She missed the tender moments they had shared while she was waiting for Harry’s birth. Now Frank seemed to scarcely think of her.
While Frank was on a tear, Matilda had remained uncharacteristically quiet. One day Maud came upon her mother sitting in the parlor, an abandoned half-sewn christening gown for Jamie folded in her lap. She was murmuring something under her breath.
“What are you doing, Mother?”
Startled, Matilda dropped the dress. “Connecting to my spirit guide,” she said. “Trying to speak to baby Jamie.”
The next day, Maud found a seam ripper and tore the little dress apart. She took the blue satin ribbon, rolled it up, and replaced it in her sewing basket; a few minutes later, she picked up the ribbon and threw it into the stove.
Matilda’s fascination with theosophy was increasingly drawing Frank in. While Maud tended to the household, her mother and her husband spent hours immersed in conversation about the possibilities that alternate worlds existed, just next to our own, and that people could learn to sense them and even cross from one to the next and back again. Maud despaired of getting Frank to pay attention to the world they lived in now—the one where there were mouths to feed and bills to pay, laundry to wash and fold, and children to tuck into bed.
Frank brought a copy of The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer home each week. At first, the newspaper had been fun to read. The first several pages were standard boilerplate—copy he purchased to fill the pages—but he had also written amusing accounts of Aberdeen’s social goings-on and some opinion pieces about the affairs of the day, and most of it had been quite fun and lively. Now, though, the pages were filled with fantastic stories of flying machines and mechanical people and electric contraptions that did the work of people and wells that pumped themselves and irrigated the fields. Frank kept saying that folks in Aberdeen lacked imagination, that there was a fantastic future and it was right around the corner. But Maud knew that the people of Aberdeen were too occupied with the present to concern themselves with a fantastical future. Every day another merchant closed his doors; every week she saw another family piling their belongings on a wagon and leaving town.
Frank’s readers surely wanted a solid weather forecast, an assurance that the bank was solvent, and a loan to buy wheat seed, not stories of talking machines, just as Maud wanted money to buy groceries, shoes for the children, and to keep a roof over their heads, not her mother’s stories about a golden path that led to enlightenment.
At last, Matilda boarded the train to return to Syracuse. Maud found that she was relieved to see her go.
By February, their income had slowed to a trickle. Frank had gone around making inquiries about securing more funds to get him through this slow spot, but the local businessmen had given him discouraging news. There were rumors that Aberdeen’s biggest bank, the Northwestern National Bank—whose half-finished brick structure had so impressed Maud their first day in town—might not be solvent for long. Everyone was jittery. If the bank failed, most of the people in Aberdeen and the surrounding county would be wiped out. Frank’s hopes of finding more investors for his failing newspaper were dashed. The locals’ advice to Frank was candid: leave town.
It was then that Frank, who was normally full of energy, came down with an ague and took to bed, shivering with fevers. A few days later, both boys took sick, and soon the baby was fretful and could no longer sleep through the night. Maud herself began to feel feverish, but she ignored her symptoms, fueling herself on coffee and sugar to save more food for Frank and the boys. Soon, she was lightheaded and exhausted. Standing over the stove, stirring a pot of thin soup with just some flour mixed in to thicken it, she felt woozy. When she opened her eyes, she was lying on the floor with the soup ladle next to her head and Bunting squatting down, crying “Mama,” his eyes wide in fear as he shook her shoulder. The Baum household was in crisis.
In the midst of all this, Maud received a letter from Julia. Times were hard on the homestead. Julia had changed her mind. She wanted to send Magdalena to Aberdeen, after all.
Feverish and exhausted, Maud stared at the letter as if from a great distance. She had begged her sister so many times to send her, and yet now she had barely the strength to take care of her own family. She longed to bring Magdalena home, but Frank was too sick to get out of bed, their pantry was nearly empty, and they had no prospects for how to fill it. The small sum of money Mother had left them—all she could afford—was all gone, and T.C. was still out west, with no immediate plans to return to Aberdeen. What if Maud took the child from Julia only to realize that she could not provide for her? There was no work to be had in Aberdeen. Frank would need to hit the road and look for employment elsewhere—until then, Maud knew, the meager stores in the pantry were not sufficient to tide them over. Still, she’d have to make do somehow.
The next day, her fever abated, leaving her weak and exhausted, but still she held off for a few days, reading and rereading her sister’s letter, tossing and turning at night, barely able to sleep. On the third day, she wrote a letter to her sister and, without showing it to Frank, sent it by afternoon post.
As soon as he was strong enough, Frank took their last few dollars to buy a one-way ticket to Chicago. Their dream—Frank’s dream—that a man could find a place for himself if he just set out and looked for the right place to do it was dead.
And Maud realized the truth: that even after almost a decade of marriage, and three births, her family still had no real place in the world.
A MONTH AFTER FRANK departed for Chicago, he wired that he had found a job and was returning to help them pack up and move with him to the city. He warned Maud that the money to pay for their journey would have to be found by selling off most of their personal possessions. Maud looked around their small home, at their simple furniture and their few wedding gifts, remembering the high hopes she had felt two and a half years earlier when they had arrived here. Those dreams would soon be erased, torn asunder as if a prairie cyclone had come through and blown them all away. But no one could take her memories. She surveyed the comfortable rooms, determined to imprint on her mind the joyful times her family had spent there.
After Frank returned, Maud traveled to Ellendale, switched trains, and debarked at Edgeley. James Carpenter was waiting for her, but she was dismayed to see that Julia had not accompanied him to the station. At least he appeared sober. He greeted her courteously, if a bit distantly. Maud wasn’t sure how much he remembered about their last encounter, although she remembered it all too vividly.
There wasn’t much to the town of Edgeley, just some drab frame buildings, a short main street with a saloon on each end, and a few mean houses scattered around in a haphazard fashion. The road out of town led to their homestead, about eight miles to the west. Julia had few near neighbors, and most of them were German-speaking Hutterites from Bohemia who kept to themselves. At one point, Maud and James came upon a slough of water that reflected the sky with a deep slate color, its surface rippled in the breeze like furrows on a plowed field. A flock of Canada geese bobbed on the surface.
The sun was already falling when they reached the homestead. An unseasonable thaw the previous week had melted the snow, and the ground was boggy and barren-looking. Maud noticed that there were now a few scrawny trees Julia and James had planted for a windbreak, but still the setting was one of total isolation—the house looked as if a strong wind could blow it away.
James did not even come inside—he said he had to return to LaMoure, where he was helping a neighbor plant trees on his claim. The wagon rattled away, leaving Maud with her small valise, standing on the flat, empty plain.
“Auntie M!”
Ten-year-old Magdalena flew around the side of the house, braids whipping behind her, and threw her arms around Maud. She was wearing the blue gingham dress, now too short and so old that the blue checks had almost faded to white. A tear along the hem made it hang unevenly. Matilda’s wool socks were bunched around her ankles, exposing the pale, bluish color of her thin legs.
“Slow down, Dorothy,” Magdalena cried out as she slowed to a walk. Maud looked around but saw no one, not even a doll in Magdalena’s arms. She could still vividly picture the shattered doll, its painted eyes staring blankly from inside the grave.
“Dorothy, mind your manners and say hello to Auntie M. And curtsy if you please.”
After a moment’s confusion, Maud caught on.
“Hello, there, Dorothy,” Maud said, turning to face her niece’s imaginary companion. “I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“And she’s pleased to make yours,” Magdalena said.
“Where’s your mother?”
“Mama’s sick.”
“And who is looking after you?”
“Dorothy is.”
Inside, the tiny house was neat, but the main room was freezing. The fire had gone out. Maud pushed the bedroom door open to a waft of fetid air.
Julia was turned away from her, and as Maud’s eyes adjusted to the light, she realized that her bedding was stained with large crimson splotches.
“Julia?” Maud whispered.
Her sister did not stir.
“Julia!” Maud placed her hand on her sister’s cheek, alarmed to find it cold. She gave her a light shake, followed by a harder one.
Her sister opened her eyes slowly. “Maud?”
On the table next to her bed stood several empty bottles of Godfrey’s Cordial. Next to the bed stood a bucket filled with bloody rags. From the mess emerged the translucent curled-up fingers of a tiny hand.
“Julia, you need a doctor! I’m going to call one at once!”
“Call no one, Maud. If I live, no one must know.”
Maud leaned against the wall of the tiny room to steady herself.
“Julia, Julia…what have you done?”
“A Bohemian woman from the neighboring claim…James said we couldn’t support another mouth to feed…”
“Say no more!” Maud cried out. “Pray, Julia, say no more.”
WHEN MAUD LEFT THE BEDROOM, Magdalena was perched on a wooden chair, her heels on the chair rungs, her expression solemn. She had placed two cups from her miniature china set on the table. “Dorothy and I are having some tea,” she said. “Would you like some?”
A locomotive was rushing full speed through Maud’s head. Her thoughts were garbled, her knees shaking, but she tried to force an expression of calm upon her face so as not to alarm the child, who was looking up at her with large, unblinking eyes.
“Auntie M?”
“Yes, sweet pea?”
“If Mama dies, please don’t leave me alone here. Dorothy is afraid of the wolves.”
Maud turned her face to hide the tears that now flooded her eyes. She squatted down and put her arm around the girl. “I will never leave you alone,” she whispered.
“Or Dorothy, either,” Magdalena whispered. “Promise!”
“Or Dorothy, either,” Maud said. “I promise.”
THE EARLY SPRING NIGHT was moonless, and the heavens were bedecked with a glittering expanse of stars. Alone, Maud wielded the shovel, chipping away at the cold, hard ground. She sweated beneath her dress and wrap. When she paused to rest, her teeth chattered. Her hands were soon raw, her muscles aching.
Wolves howled in the distance. This only gave her more strength, as she was determined to bury what remained deep enough that the wolves wouldn’t dig it up.
The torment from her hands, her neck, and her back engulfed her until the stars spun in the heavens and a faint dawn glow burned in the distant sky. The simple stone that marked baby Jamie’s grave stood watch, taunting Maud not to give up before her work was finished.
At last the hole, though narrow, was as deep as the length of her arm. She upended the bucket and threw a spadeful of dirt on top of it.
Shivering in the predawn light, Maud tamped down the earth on top of her makeshift burial plot. “ ‘The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit,’ ” Maud whispered. “At least, I hope.”
Dry-eyed but heavy-hearted, she returned to the little shanty. She was still seated on a kitchen chair, staring into the fireplace, when Magdalena awoke. In Maud’s lap was Magdalena’s dress, which Maud had mended while the girl slept.
A week later, Frank arrived, having found a neighbor to watch the boys and hitched a ride from Edgeley with a passing farmer. By then, Julia was able to sit up for most of the day. Maud said nothing of the condition in which she had found her sister, but she pulled him aside immediately and told him that there was trouble in the household, and that no matter the difficulty of their own financial situation, they needed to take responsibility for Magdalena’s care. Frank quickly agreed.
Magdalena was happy to see her favorite uncle.
“Dorothy, this is your Uncle Frank!”
Without missing a beat, Frank dropped down on one knee and held out his hand in greeting. “Well, how do you do, Miss Dorothy? I’m pleased to meet you. And what a pretty red dress you are wearing.”
“Her dress is blue gingham, Uncle Frank, just like mine.”
Frank made an elaborate pantomime of rubbing his eyes. “Why, forgive me! It must be dust from the road that got in my eyes. Of course it is, blue gingham, and pretty at that.”
“And she has black pigtails and a little pet dog that she carries around in a basket with her. And his name is Toto.”
Frank fished around in his pocket and pretended to pull something out. “And look what I have here,” Frank said. “Hair ribbons for a pigtailed girl and a nice meaty bone for her dog.”
“Dorothy wants to take you out to see where the prairie dogs live.”
“Well, then let’s go see the prairie dogs. Come along, Toto.” Frank whistled.
“He’s going to ride in Dorothy’s basket,” Magdalena said. “You don’t need to whistle.”
They came back an hour later, Magdalena smiling as she recounted Uncle Frank’s wild story about a city for the prairie dogs under the ground where they had streetcars and electric lights and could even talk!
After lunch, Frank and Maud sent Magdalena out to play, and Frank began to speak earnestly to Julia.
“We won’t have much to offer,” he said. “But pray let us take darling Magdalena with us. It will lighten your burden, and we will care for her as if she is our own.”
Julia’s face had been pale since Maud had arrived and found her ill, but now it turned a sickly yellow, with points of red flaming at the balls of her cheeks.
“How dare you, Maud?”
“I beg your pardon? I don’t mean to offend you. We’re offering to help because we understand that times are hard.”
“But you said no!” Julia almost screamed. “I have it right here, the letter. Here!”
She pushed herself out of her chair like an old woman and began rummaging through a pile of opened letters that were stacked up on her chest of drawers.
“Here it is,” she said, shaking it in Maud’s direction. She began to read aloud in a wooden tone.
“ ‘My dear Julia, as much as we love our darling Magdalena as if she were our own daughter, our current state of family flux would make it difficult for us to accept Magdalena right now. As soon as our situation improves, we will bring her in with open arms. Love, your devoted sister, Maud.’ ”
“Maud?” Frank’s brows rose over his eyes as he turned to look at her, eyes wide with surprise. He took the letter from Julia’s hand and read it with disbelief, then turned back to Maud as if Julia were not even there.
“But darling! Why?”
Maud shook her head and avoided his eyes. Why, indeed? On the day she had received her sister’s letter, she had felt so wrecked, so hopeless, yet this—this was so much worse.
“You see!” Julia said. She started pacing across the room. “You know how hard it is for me to let her go. She’s my only companion, and the wolves, they do so howl at night, and James is away so often. One night, Magdalena awoke and said she saw a woman dressed all in white standing next to her bed, not saying anything. It gave both of us a terrible fright. So, I didn’t want to let her go—away from me, my only solace—but James said we couldn’t manage another mouth to feed. So I took matters into my own hands.” She sounded half out of her mind. Frank glanced at Maud, who had not shared the intimate details of the past week.
“I’m dreadfully sorry,” Maud said. “It is purely my own fault for not understanding that the situation was so dire. There were difficulties…” She looked at Frank imploringly. “I made a mistake. Now I understand, and I’ve changed my mind. We’ve changed our minds—right, Frank?”
“Let Magdalena go,” Frank said, his voice firm. “You are not fit to take care of a child right now.”
“Not fit! Not fit? How can you say that? I made the ultimate sacrifice.” Julia’s voice was shrill.
“Times are hard all around,” Frank said mildly. “Just let us keep her for a while to ease your burden.”
“That will never happen. I made my choice,” Julia said. “I chose Magdalena. She will stay with me.”
Maud glanced across the room, and to her chagrin, she saw that Magdalena was kneeling just beyond the slightly open front door, peeking in. She had been listening the whole time. Now she jumped up and, banging the door, ran outside. Through the window, Maud watched Magdalena run toward the horizon as fast as her feet would carry her, her skirt catching on sodden stalks of dead prairie grass, her braids flapping, her faded gingham dress billowing out behind her.
Frank and Maud found Magdalena seated next to her baby brother’s headstone, knees drawn up, her face in her arms.
Frank touched her gently on her shoulder.
“I want to go with you,” she said.
“Magdalena, you will always have a home at our house,” Maud said.
“Always,” Frank said. “As long as you live.”
“But why can’t I go now?” Magdalena said. Her face was streaked with tears, her manner serious.
Maud fished down into her pocket and pulled out a clean handkerchief, like a white flag of surrender, which she used to blot away the tears from her niece’s smudged face.
“Your mother needs you here,” Maud said. “You are a brave girl, and you will be all right without us.”
Magdalena, however, was inconsolable. She lay on the damp ground next to her brother’s grave and howled with a misery so profound that it seemed to expand to fill all the vast, bleak, flat, arid land around them, as if all of the sorrow of all of the people stuck out here trying to chip a living out of this vast, uncompromising plain were contained in her small body.
While she lay there, black clouds massed, covering half the sky, and a few fat raindrops fell. The girl, clad only in her thin gingham dress and a shawl, began to shiver. Frank unbuttoned his wool jacket. He knelt down beside her and placed the heavy garment over her shoulders. They waited silently next to her.
Finally, Magdalena was all cried out. She sat up and wiped the rest of her tears off her cheeks with the back of her hand, and Frank brushed her straying hair up off her forehead. She appeared tiny, swamped in the oversize contours of Frank’s jacket.
“Is Chicago very far away?”
“Just two days on the train,” Maud said. “Not as far as you would think.”
“Two whole days?”
“And we can write you letters, and you’ll write to us as well. And as soon as we’re settled, we’ll invite you and your mother to come for a visit.”
None of Maud’s words seemed to mollify the girl in the least. The sky had grown menacing, but the sun shone through in places. Frank scooped up Magdalena, still wrapped in his jacket, to carry her back to the house.
Magdalena gasped, and Frank followed her gaze. “Well, will you look at that!” he cried out. He grinned and started spinning around with Magdalena in his arms. She leaned her head back to look at the expanse whirling above her. After he slowed, he set Magdalena gently back on the ground and knelt down beside her again, gesturing at the stormy sky. Fighting their way through the mass of clouds, bands of orange, yellow, blue, indigo, and violet shimmered in a short arc.
“Look right there, it’s a bit of a rainbow, come to brighten our day. Make a wish!” Frank said quickly.
Magdalena closed her eyes and pressed them shut with her hands. She murmured, and Maud realized that she was repeating the word “Chicago” under her breath.
“Oh, but it’s no use,” Magdalena said, turning back to look at her homestead shanty, now turned the color of ash in the gloomy light. “I know I can’t leave. Mama can’t stay by herself. What if she gets sick and there is no one to take care of her? I’m responsible for my age. I can do the chores of a hired girl—Papa says so. It’s just that sometimes—it’s hard.” Magdalena hiccuped, then choked back a sob, and then she was crying again.
Frank slipped his arm around his niece as he knelt beside her, pointing back to the rainbow, which was still visible, peeking through a break in the clouds.
“Look at that rainbow, and I want you to remember something.”
Magdalena nodded. Her chin quivered.
“There’s a man named the Rainbow King, and he lives in the heavens. In a beautiful castle. The sun always shines there, and there are so many good things to eat, and the beds are softer than a million feathers…”
Magdalena’s eyes were wide.
“Sometimes he sends his daughter down to us. She walks right along the rainbow and comes down to earth to play. Sometimes her father pulls that rainbow up and she stays on earth for a long time, and she has lots of adventures. But when she really, really needs something, he puts it back down, and she skips right back to her daddy, right across that rainbow bridge.”
Magdalena nodded solemnly.
“Now, I know your life seems hard sometimes, but I want you to remember that if you ever get very worried, just think about that rainbow—and if you use your imagination, you will be able to skip straight over the rainbow to play with the Rainbow King’s daughter, in their beautiful land, and you won’t feel so alone, and when you’re ready to come home, you just have to tap your feet together three times, and he’ll put the rainbow down, and you can come straight home.”
Magdalena’s face had brightened.
She stood up, raised her chin, straightened her braids, and smoothed down her skirt.
“You can do this,” Frank said.
“I can,” she said.
“Thank you,” Maud breathed.
When it was time for them to leave, Maud held on to her little niece a bit longer than she should have, afraid that if she let go too soon, Magdalena would see her tears.
While they murmured their goodbyes, Frank pulled Julia aside. “The moment you don’t feel safe here, Julia, you have a home with us. Promise you’ll remember that?”
Julia and Magdalena stood side by side as Maud and Frank climbed into the hired wagon, the grizzled driver shifting in his seat, anxious to be off. When they were settled, he shook the reins and the pair started to trot. But just after they began to roll, Magdalena bolted toward them so fast that Frank leapt off, catching her so that she wouldn’t get caught up in the wheels.
“Wait!” Magdalena cried, one arm outstretched. “I’m staying here, but Dorothy wants to go with you.”
Maud looked at Frank and signaled him with an almost imperceptible shake of the head.
“I don’t think so, Magdalena,” Frank said gently. “Dorothy needs to stay to keep you company.”
“No!” Magdalena’s voice quavered, her chin all puckered. “She doesn’t want to stay. She wants to go with you! She’s very itty-bitty small. She won’t take up any space at all.”
“But, Magdalena—” Maud protested.
“Auntie M, please!”
“But Dorothy will keep you company. She would miss you, and the prairie dogs, and your house and the fields. She wants to stay with you,” Frank said.
Magdalena stamped her foot and jutted out her chin, eyes flashing. “She says no. She says you’re not listening. She wants to go to Chicago! She’ll skip right back over the rainbow and tell me all about it, whenever she wants. Won’t you, Dorothy?”
Julia stepped toward Magdalena and grasped her arm. “Come now, Magdalena. That’s enough of your woolgathering. Your aunt and uncle need to leave—I’m sure it’s about to rain.”
Magdalena’s face was wrinkled up like a furious prune, her brows knit together. She stamped her foot again. “She wants to go!”
Maud gave Frank a tiny nod. “Well, all right then, missy.” Frank lowered the step and placed his foot on the running board. “Dorothy, say goodbye and then climb on up.”
“And Toto, too!” Magdalena said firmly.
She clasped one hand over her stick-thin arm and watched, her large violet eyes unblinking, as Frank and Maud went through an elaborate pantomime, first making room on the spring seat for Dorothy, next tucking a robe around her imaginary legs, then petting her pretend pup and setting its make-believe basket beside them.
As the wagon began to roll away, Magdalena lifted her hand and slowly began to wave, and Maud held her breath. Suddenly Frank jumped up, shaded his eyes with his hand, and cried out, “Oh, Toto! You naughty little pup! Where are you running so fast?”
Getting impatient, the driver raised his whip. His pair of horses picked up a faster trot; by now they were a good distance from the house. Balancing in the jarring wagon, Frank shouted, “I’m sorry, Magdalena, but that puppy wanted to stay with you. Here!” He scooped up something, a handful of air, and tossed it to the girl. “It’s his basket!” he called out. “I think you might need it.”
Magdalena teetered there for a moment longer, as if undecided, but at last Maud saw her grab the imaginary basket by its handle and disappear around the back of the house and out of sight.
They rode along in silence for a good long while, and they were almost back to the Edgeley depot when the rainbow reappeared, this time not just a piece of it but a semicircle, arching all the way across the big prairie sky, its vivid colors in sharp contrast to the gray landscape.
“You see that rainbow?”
Maud nodded miserably.
“You know where I’d like to live?” Frank said.
“Where, Frank?” Maud said.
“If one end of this rainbow lives on this bleak and soulless plain, then I’d like to be clear out at the far end of it. Somewhere, somewhere over there is a place that is better. I’m just sure of it, Maudie.”
Maud scooched her way across the bare wooden bench until she was leaning up against him.
“Do you really think so?” she asked.
“I’m just sure of it,” Frank said. “And another thing, Maudie, as hard as this may be for you—that godforsaken shack on the prairie, your cranky, bent-over sister, that field full of prairie dogs? That’s home for Magdalena. Nothing can change that.”
“We’ve let her down.”
“No, we did the best we could,” Frank said. “And you know what we’ll do now?” he asked, miming that he was tucking a blanket around a child’s legs. “We’ll look after Dorothy. Together.”
He regarded her, his eyes the same shade as the slate-colored sky. “Promise?”
Maud looked up at the rainbow. It appeared to start just over the cluster of lonely buildings that made up the town of Edgeley, but then it arched up and disappeared into the clouds. Was it possible? Was there really somewhere else—somewhere at the far end of the rainbow that was better than this place? She certainly hoped so.
“Maudie?”
She nodded morosely. “I promise.”