In our eagerness to escape Aunt Maude, Carlie and I were out of the house after breakfast each day and on our way to the cow barn to see the cows milked. The barn was lit with lanterns that cast shadows of giant cows on the walls. It smelled of milk and hay and animals and was full of the cows’ restless shuffling and warmth. Carlie loved to play with the cats and kittens that were kept in the barn to hunt mice.
We followed the wagons that carted the milk from the barn to the dairy. The dairy was cool on even the warmest day, for gallons of cold well water flowed through the contraption that separated the cream from the milk. The cream was then churned into hundreds of pounds of butter. From the dairy, wagons carried the milk and butter to the asylum kitchens.
While the dairy was cool, the asylum laundry was so hot that Carlie would not go into it. “It makes me melt,” she complained. The patients who had to work there gathered outside the building on their breaks, their faces shining with sweat, their damp clothes clinging to their backs. They drank gallons of water, and I had seen them on a dare, giggling and full of mischief, tip the water pails over one another.
All the food for the patients was grown on the farm. The fields with their rows of corn and lettuce and tomatoes and carrots were like a market. There was a cannery, where vegetables were put up to feed the patients in the winter. There was a piggery, where we were allowed to hold the small piglets that struggled in our arms until they slipped out and went squealing to their mothers. There was a butchery, but we never went there. Whenever I thought of it, I had bad dreams.
The most amazing place was the series of heated glasshouses where flowers lived in rooms like people. Patients worked there. Our favorite gardener was Louis. He was grandfather old, with a stoop to his shoulders from leaning over the glasshouse benches and the flower beds. He had brown eyes that were magnified by his glasses and got even bigger when he was talking about his flowers. He was always on the lookout for bugs, and when he found them, he squeezed them to death between his bare fingers. Louis was always happy to answer my questions.
“Do you sell the flowers?” I asked.
“Oh, no, miss,” he said. “When a garden looks a little bare, we tuck new plants in, but most of the flowers we send up to the asylum. Before I was myself again, it was what I looked forward to. I liked to guess what would turn up. I favored the snapdragons. When I was well enough to work, I said, ‘Send me to the flowers.’”
Though Louis appeared very gentle, he told us that he had come to the asylum because he had sent letters to the governor and the congressmen in our state and to the president in Washington. “I told them what I thought of them, told them what I was going to do to them too if they didn’t pay attention to what I said.” He looked sheepish. “Guess I got a little carried away. I still write my letters, but they won’t let me mail them.” He looked around to see if anyone was watching. “I got one right here to President McKinley. Be a good girl, Verna, and mail it for me.” Before I could refuse, he hastily tucked it into the pocket of my pinafore and scurried away.
“You’re going to mail it for him, aren’t you?” Carlie asked. Louis always sent Carlie home with a fistful of blooms. “There are stamps in Papa’s study.”
“I don’t think I should mail it without showing it to Papa.”
“If you do that, you’ll get Louis into trouble.”
I thought for a minute. “I’ll show it to Eleanor. She’ll know what to do.”
Eleanor unfolded the letter and read it out to us:
Dear President McKinley,
I am a veteran of the Civil War and fought for my country, which is now in trouble because someone, and I ain’t saying who, is sending birds to watch me. The birds are up in the trees looking in my window and watching me when I’m working. I’m not going to do anything to the birds because it ain’t their fault, but look out in Washington, D.C.
Yours truly,
Louis Snartler
“I’ll tell you what,” Eleanor said, “Let’s just pretend the woodstove is a mailbox. That way Louis isn’t going to get into any trouble. We don’t want any policemen from Washington coming here and looking for him.”
“What will you tell Louis?” Carlie asked me.
“I’ll think of something.” It seemed to me that Louis was making things up a little like the authors who wrote the books I loved to read.
A few days later, when we saw Louis again, he said, “Well, that letter I told you about got some action. There’s a whole new set of birds up there, and they ain’t paying me any attention.” So everything turned out all right.
If Aunt Maude was making calls on the wives of the doctors, we sometimes stayed at home with Eleanor. Carlie and I would beg Eleanor to tell us what the asylum was like inside, for the great building was a mystery. Eleanor would not stop working but chatted on as she peeled potatoes or polished the silver. “It’s cozy, really. They keep everything spotless, and there are even white tablecloths in the dining rooms, something I never saw at our farm. Flowers are set about on the tables, and there are pots of ivy hanging from the ceiling so you feel you are in a fairy forest. They have dances for the patients and card parties, and once they took us out and let us fly kites. That was my favorite day. I was still on the locked ward then, and it was such a treat to see those kites up in the sky, free as could be, but still they had that string to fall back on so they wouldn’t just drift away.”
Eleanor lowered her voice as though someone might overhear her. “Of course, the back wards are not so nice. The patients there are what they call disturbed, and they break things. You couldn’t have vases of flowers about on the back wards. I was there just for a few days when I first came. That’s where I met Lucy Anster, who was my special friend. We were both in a bad way. I was crying all the time, and Lucy kept finding a way to hurt herself. Lucy is still there, but they soon had me to rights, and here I am. The doctor says if I keep improving, I might get to visit the farm and see my brother, Tom, and my mom and dad. I’m lonesome for my mother and Tom.”
“Not your dad?” I asked.
“He’s like your aunt Maude. Nothing I do pleases him.” Eleanor quickly looked around. “I shouldn’t say anything against your aunt. I’m sure she means well, and she’s taught me how to take care of all your nice things.” Eleanor gave the silver teapot an extra buffing.
“I think she’s mean to you,” Carlie said. “She’s always scolding you.”
Eleanor’s shoulders drooped, and tears formed in the corners of her eyes. “I’m used to that. I got plenty of it from my dad. What’s hard is being inside a house all day. Farm women like me are used to the screen door slamming. There’s weeding and hoeing in the kitchen garden. Then there’s the berry picking: raspberries on the farm and wild blueberries and blackberries off somewhere in the woods. Even in the winter there’s breaking a trail through the snow to feed the chickens and collect eggs. Sometimes this house is like a collar that’s too tight around my throat. I feel eingeschlossen.”
Eleanor said that was German for “shut in” and got me a penny from Papa. I knew when I went to Papa, he would ask me where I had heard the word, and I was all prepared. I said, “That’s how Eleanor feels because she misses being outside. Aunt Maude keeps her so busy, she can’t even sit on the porch steps for a breath of fresh air.”
That evening I was delighted to hear Papa instruct Aunt Maude, “You must give Eleanor an hour off every afternoon.”
Aunt Maude bristled. “I never heard of such a thing, letting the help have a holiday like that.”
Papa was firm. “One hour a day is not too large a price to pay if it helps Eleanor to recover from her illness.”
“This house is not part of the asylum,” Aunt Maude insisted.
Papa had the last word. “That is just what it is.”
From then on, when the dinner dishes were done, the vegetables were scrubbed for supper, and the table was set, Eleanor burst out of the house with Carlie holding one hand and me the other. Aunt Maude stood wistfully at the kitchen window, watching as we ran off.
There was always something new to see when we were with Eleanor. She discovered things where anyone else might just pass right by without a second look: a cocoon attached to a branch, or the shape of the holes a woodpecker made in a tree, or a little patch of violets hidden in the grass. Eleanor’s favorite place was the small lake at the edge of the asylum fields. We could walk all around it in half an hour. It was called Mud Lake, but Carlie said that was an ugly name. She called it Green Lake, for in the afternoons the reflection of the trees that ringed the shore made the water a deep green.
We had not been allowed to go there unless someone was with us. Aunt Maude would not go, and Papa was too busy, so we were exploring the lake for the first time. There was a beaver lodge on the lake, and Eleanor said if we got down on our hands and knees, we could smell the musky odor of the animals inside, and that was true. The beavers, who slept all day, woke up when they heard us. They swam out into the lake and hit the water with their tails to make an explosion. Eleanor said, “It’s their way of warning the other beavers that strangers are nearby.”
When it was hot, we took off our shoes and socks and, holding up our skirts, waded in the water, feeling the soft mud ooze up between our toes. Eleanor made us stay close to shore. She warned, “If you give it a chance, that mud sucks at you like hands grabbing hold of you and pulling you down.”
Sometimes we would scare up a heron. The heron was nearly as tall as Carlie, and after she saw it spear a frog with its cruel beak, Carlie hated the bird. Eleanor showed us raccoon tracks and the empty clamshells the raccoons had left behind after their midnight supper. Carlie, who could not see a thing without picking it up and taking it home, collected the shells for doll dishes. I gathered snail shells, and Eleanor showed me how to make a hole in each and string them for bracelets. Like the wild berries we picked, the shells were just there, gifts, and you didn’t even have to be good to get them—which was just as well, because I knew I was not being good. I was going out of my way to make Aunt Maude see how much more Carlie and I liked being with Eleanor than we liked being with her. I hoped she would take the hint and go back home.
Each afternoon Eleanor’s hour flew by, but no amount of coaxing kept her too long at the lake, for once we had been a couple of minutes late in getting back and found Aunt Maude standing on the pack porch, a hand shading her eyes, watching for us. “If you are late again, Eleanor,” she said, “you will take your rest hour here in the house.”