Twenty-three

Harvest was completed on Tuesday night, the mania over. Aglaia awoke in the dark at four-thirty on Wednesday morning, her internal clock still topsy-turvy from the disruption of travel and the pace set by Byron, Sebastian, and Silas as they pushed to finish off the work. She swung her legs out from between the floral bedsheets of her maidenhood, her whole body stiff and sore, then propped her elbows on her knees and bent her head to her palms till the fog lifted.

Aglaia reached for the drinking glass by her bedside but it was empty, so she took it downstairs to the kitchen and turned on the tap. Well water, full of iron and tinted yellow, had a flavor Dad relished. Since her childhood he’d refused to put in a softener despite Tina’s entreaties. Aglaia never wore true white until she moved to the city and found out how sudsy water could be. But she craved the taste and gulped down two glasses, letting the frigid overflow dribble onto her top.

Aglaia was wide awake for the first time in three days. The Enns family would still be asleep, no breakfast cooking at their place down the road, but she was famished now. Mom’s refrigerator held a bowl of eggs and a sealer of sweet cream, so Aglaia mixed up an omelette mousseline and brewed coffee for dunking her toasted Zwieback—a truly multicultural breakfast. She sat at the table in Dad’s chair and contemplated the nightscape out of the window as she ate.

The tempest had passed while she slept, the thunder cell moving westward and leaving a puddle shimmering on the grass outside like a shard of mirror blinking back up at the sky. Dawn wouldn’t break for a while yet. She might as well resign herself to getting dressed, but somehow she dreaded the day ahead. Her thought life had been so occupied with physical labor that the free time might be hard to take, with the whole day to kill. The plan was for Byron to drive her to the city tomorrow morning, stopping along the way to pick up her parents at the hospital in Sterling to save them the cost of an ambulance ride to Henry’s appointment with the specialist in Denver.

Aglaia’s suitcase lay unzipped on the floor near the table. She’d brought it from Naomi’s Monday after supper and hadn’t bothered to take it upstairs to the bedroom, just digging through it for her shampoo and clean underwear as needed. The Bible had slipped out sometime during the night and sprawled open, face down on the linoleum. She prodded it with her toe.

It was abhorrent to her, an indictment of her failure on so many levels. Yet she couldn’t despise it—either the particular volume heaped at her feet or the timeless composition of the Bible itself that was more than leather and paper and ink. It held too much meaning that went beyond her attempts to either deliver this copy to François or decipher his memoirs. Be honest, she told herself: They were her memoirs as well, and not restricted to that summer fifteen years ago. Her life had been written between the lines of that book long before François ever inserted his thoughts into the margins.

Aglaia withstood the urge to pick it up; it had served its purposes and she was done with it. But the Bible wasn’t so easily dismissed. Her subconscious was soaked in the words of the text, and they taunted her now while she sat at the table with the starlight twinkling through the lace of the window curtain, bright specks of creation reminding her of heaven. She might try to ignore the Bible, but a far-off roll of thunder still boomed out praises to all who would listen. Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters, her memory echoed. As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish… so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

The words antagonized her. She stood up and kicked that book once, and then again and again with rising fury, panting with the exertion, its pages tearing between her toes, until the Bible rested crumpled near the hot air vent by the cupboard and torn bits with lay scattered around. She turned her back on the mess.

She put on Tina’s rubber boots encrusted with last week’s mud and trudged away from the house and the ravaged Bible into the candy-floss sunrise, all pink and blue, and kept her head down to shun the celestial splendor. She must stretch her legs and air out her mind but, though it wasn’t even seven o’clock, she wouldn’t risk walking the road in the direction of Naomi’s home in case she was spotted and called in for coffee.

She’d seen enough of Naomi these past few days, though never alone—a silent but mutual decision. So far Aglaia had withheld the fact of having met François in Paris and she didn’t want to be quizzed about it. But Naomi was deflecting something, too, for all her culinary hospitality. At first, Aglaia chalked up Naomi’s preoccupation to the taxing harvest tasks rather than out-and-out avoidance. But since Aglaia’s arrival, Naomi never entered a room without a child on her hip or a teen within earshot, almost as if she were as wary in sidestepping some subject as Aglaia was in resisting reference to her romance in Paris. For just a while longer Aglaia wanted to hug the secret of François to herself till she grew tired of fondling it and was ready to admit its cheapness. Two sides of her character contended within her, one beatifying her passion for François and the other denouncing her gullibility.

Aglaia was dubious that he’d write—he hadn’t yet, when she’d logged in to her account on the Enns computer yesterday afternoon. She considered sending off a quick message to him but had only his commercial address from the tavern and didn’t know who else might access it. Anyway, if something were to come of the interaction in Paris, she wanted François to be the one to make the next move, to woo her as he’d done that summer. But she was no shy teen after all and, to be honest, she wasn’t serious about going back to him in France. The exotic setting made her too vulnerable. Her stomach leapt again at the thought of his kiss in the doorway of his room before she ran off to catch the subway to the airport. But her heart’s desire was to stay in her dream as long as possible.

Aglaia filled her lungs with the fresh morning air. The farmyard never changed except for the trees—the maples and elders and the windbreak of lilac bushes twice her height. Less than a foot tall at planting twenty years ago, the four hundred seedling bushes had required hours of hoeing by Aglaia and Joel. Weeds still thrive during drought, she thought. Ah, how they fought that prairie drought! Every week throughout the growing season, Dad hooked the tank up to the tractor and crept along the periphery of the yard, water draining from the half-opened valve in the back for the kids to catch in their one-gallon plastic ice cream pails and fling at the thirsty roots. They’d fill and empty, fill and empty, jogging to keep up, sweating and cheerful because Mom always poured them fruit punch as a reward and, more, because they splashed one another every couple of bucketsful. Who needed air conditioning when you had a brother with good aim?

She passed the sandbox overgrown now with quackgrass, and the bunkhouse her grandfather constructed for his hired hands before her father was even born, and the old smokehouse where her great-grandmother hung up the Worscht to cure. A flock of partridges took her by surprise, rising from the grass with a noisy flutter and a flash of white bellies. She passed the machine shop where she and Joel watched their father weld or work his circular saw while they squatted on the oily concrete, discussing together how the corroded blacksmith tools might have worked in the olden days—the bellows, the tongs—imaging they could hear the ring of the hammer on steel glowing orange from the forge.

And the barn! If anything defined this farmyard, Aglaia thought as she stepped onto the cement pad at its entrance, it was the weathered, red-and-white barn with the cedar shingles, the sliding door that always stuck. Did it still? She butted her shoulder up against the door’s edge and leaned into it until it gave way with a grating squeal and moved, bit by bit, to expose the cavernous interior with its cobwebs and rough-hewn beams and hay-strewn floor. Joel’s tack was still there in its place, the scruffy blanket she crocheted for his birthday still hanging askew over the saddle. The milking stool lay broken nearby.

She counts seven days since the funeral—that’s 168 hours or 10,080 minutes or 604,800 seconds. Today the charitable neighbors finally let the family resume daily tasks, no longer leaving pots of sweet Plümemooss or casseroles of smoked sausage in batter bread, and now she’s taking over Joel’s chores.

Dad brings the Holstein in through the back door of the barn for Aglaia—she’s calling herself by her new name now, even if Dad and Mom won’t. Belle’s hoofs clop and her full bag swings beneath her as she plods to the chop in the manger. Aglaia removes the stool from its peg on the wall and positions the stainless steel bucket. She presses her forehead against Belle’s coarse flank and grasps the teats distending from the bag heavy with milk. As Joel taught her, she curls her fingers from the top down—left, right, left, right—and beats out the zinging tempo of the milk as it froths upward and changes tone. Joel always emptied the udder in much less than the forty minutes she spends, even counting the time he took to shoot a stream, now and again, into the mouth of a waiting cat. Joel never let the cow’s flicking tail get on his nerves. Joel wouldn’t have cried, either, she thinks when Belle kicks the pail over and the milk runs out onto the planks of the stall.

Aglaia moved away from the barn and the haunting thoughts of that summer. She stepped through the gate and lined her vision up with the barbed wire fence stretching northward. A couple of miles ahead, a massive, lone boulder jutted above the horizon. It was the fragment of a mountain deposited at the end of the last ice age, the glacial remains like a giant’s skull signaling the beginning of the dunes—the Nebraska Sand Hills—themselves vestiges of the vast inland sea that was now dried and gone.

The Klassen farm bordered the southwestern-most tongue of the hills, down in the corner of the state where Tiege’s founding Mennonites had tenaciously preserved their seclusion.

With her eye on the boulder, she began to run in her mother’s unwieldy boots—to run like a flustered goose, flailing, her neck stuck out as she strained away from the ghosts of the yard. If she’d been pursuing memories of François, she hadn’t found him here on the farmyard. He was confined to the margins of that bruised Bible lying on the kitchen floor.

By the time she was winded, she reached the grove of chokecherry bushes marking the boundary of the field.

Mary Grace is ten, and the sand flies are driving her crazy, but Joel just encourages her to keep on picking. Mom’s promised to simmer up a jug of syrup for their supper pancakes.

It’s good they had their first frost last night, he says, because it brings out the sweetness of the berries. As if she doesn’t know that. As if he has to tell her again how the settlers bootlegged wine from the fruit, how the nomadic Plains Cree pounded them into their bison pemmican to keep them nourished on their wanderings. But his stories distract her and the picking is done before she realizes the flies have quit biting.

The field had lain fallow this past season, and it was brown and dead looking. The harvest she’d been trying to forget took place late that year as well, and the last time she was in this field the air was heavy with the dusty-mellow perfume of freshly cut wheat. She didn’t want to be here. She hadn’t meant to come here today, had she?

This sacred field was where she’d read her Bible on spring mornings in her early teens, sitting on the periphery atop the pile of stones she and Joel had picked over many seasons to earn spending money. And this profaned field was where she and François parked the truck on his very last night, right here in the presence of that altar of stones where she’d spent so many hours in prayer. And this field of reclamation was where Joel declared her untouchable and put the run on François, removing him from her young life with the threat of further violence.

Aglaia’s heart was pounding, but now not from the physical exertion of her run. She forced herself to face the field against her revulsion, and turned towards it with intensity, almost expecting to see the blood. Not François’s blood from the fistfight. He didn’t figure at all in her final memory of this field—the most appalling memory—because he was already gone by then.

Her dreams for years had been leading her to this very spot, and she’d been running the other way for too long. She steeled herself and took a step into the brown field, the ground denting underfoot. It had taken place near the center—she recognized the dip, where the saline soil was white.

It’s the morning after her night of shameless lust, just a few hours since Mary Grace discovered François to be gone, and she’s drying the dishes as her mom takes a coffeecake, fragrant with cinnamon, out of the oven.

“You’re very quiet, dear,” Mom says. “I suppose it has something to do with the French Jung leaving?” Mary Grace almost drops a bowl as her temper and the temperature of her skin both flare. Did Joel blabber to Mom, too, about the compromising position he found her in last night? It’s bad enough that Dad knows.

But Mom can’t know, after all; she continues talking brightly. “Well, take your mind off your troubles and run this cake out to the field for Joel. He must be hungry.”

Dad’s gone to the village for repairs while her brother finishes up swathing the canola crop. He didn’t touch the biscuits when the family sat down at daybreak four hours ago, instead getting up to fill a thermos with coffee and snagging a banana from the bowl as he headed out the door.

But she isn’t sorry for him at all. She isn’t sorry about his bloodshot eyes; she didn’t sleep well, either. If he’d just kept his nose out of her business last night, François would still be helping him with the day’s work.

The cake pan cools on the seat beside her as she drives the trail along the fence towards the giant’s skull and turns west at the chokecherry bushes. She can see the tractor stopped in the field, Joel’s truck half-parked behind its front end. As she bounces closer, she sees the tractor must have stalled; she can make out the booster cables tying the two vehicles together, but no Joel. He’s not sitting in the cab of the tractor trying to restart the engine, and he’s not under the open hood of the truck removing the cables.

Something doesn’t look right. She rams her truck door open, adrenaline rushing, and catapults across the mounds of fallen stalks.

“Joel, are you okay? Joel!”

She doesn’t spot him until she runs around the far side of the tractor, and knows in an instant that he neglected to put it into park when he got out to boost the battery. The tractor had pitched forward, its tires crushing Joel into the furrows of the ground between the swaths, pinning him from the waist down. His eyes are closed, his face blanched. His blood is making mud beneath him.

“No!” she screams as she falls on her knees beside him, grabbing his hand. Childhood horror stories screech through her mind—the neighbor who was rolled up alive by the baler, another who slipped into the chop grinder. This can’t be happening to her brother. “Joel, talk to me!”

He opens his eyes then as if he’s been waiting for her. Opens them wide this last time—clear and blue like the heavens above them—and he smiles at her.

“Sis,” he bleats faintly.

“I’ll get Mom!” She’s shouting. “Wait. Hold on, Joel!”

But he doesn’t let go of her hand and he says to her, in a voice full of peace and awe, “It’s okay, Mary Grace. François left for Paris last night and you’ll be safe now.”

Then, with a final breath, his awareness of this life drains away through his eyes and she is left all alone under that wide blue sky.

Aglaia, in that same sacred, profaned, reclaimed field of sorrow fifteen years later, now buckled onto the earth where Joel gave up his life, his last words an unconsummated benediction: “You’ll be safe now.”

She hadn’t been safe after all. She prostrated herself on the ground before that burning bush of her worst memory and didn’t arise for perhaps an hour—until the dampness of the soil seeped through her clothing and chilled her to the soul.

In the outer reception area of Incognito first thing Wednesday morning, Eb MacAdam shook the hands of two evaluators from Hollywood’s RoundUp Studios. They were wearing business suits and introduced themselves as Jerry and John. Eb hid his amusement; denim would be more suited than Italian cashmere for representatives of a western movie. Had Aglaia been present, she’d likely have worn her bonny pink riding boots.

Eb led them into the conference room to avoid the clutter in his office.

“Please, sit down,” he encouraged them. “I’ll have some tea—or coffee?—brought in.” He asked his young work-program volunteer from the local high school to brew a pot of Arabica and then returned to his chair. “Now gentlemen, what can I do for you?”

“We were impressed with the timely submission of your bid for the costuming contract, since the deadline isn’t up for another few weeks,” the tall one, Jerry, said as he adjusted his tie.

“Incognito likes to keep on top of things.” Eb had sent the movie company an e-mail expressing interest as soon as the call for local companies was publicized, and had subsequently been invited to submit a bid on the costume package proposed by RoundUp’s design professionals. In consultation with Incognito’s parent office in Montreal, Eb spent long hours putting together the preliminary documentation and sent it off to California.

“If the quality indicated by your paperwork plays out in your workshop, you have an excellent chance at being awarded our contract.” John had hair close to Eb’s in color, and creases around his eyes as though he laughed with his family.

“We just wanted to make your acquaintance and do an initial inspection,” Jerry said. “It’s fortunate that we happened to be in town for a few days for preproduction exploration and could meet with you.”

Hardly fortunate, Eb thought. He knew from the society page blathering that PRU was throwing a dinner in honor of the Hollywood bigwigs this weekend, ostensibly as a gesture of civic hospitality but in unmitigated conflict of interest, as far as he was concerned.

“You’re the first bidder we’re reviewing, since yours is the only submission we’ve received so far, but we’ll catch the others on our return to the area after the closing date,” John explained. “You’re a strong candidate and we thought some dialogue was in order at this juncture.”

“I’d have loved to introduce you to our head designer, who’s away on compassionate leave right now,” Eb said.

“Oh yes, that would be”—John flipped up a page of his dossier—“Aglaia Klassen?”

“That’s right.”

In Eb’s estimation, Aglaia was Incognito’s greatest asset, and all the more so if they won this bid. Her artistic vision and her expertise in period fashions, her skill with all aspects of garment design and construction, and her stamina in working for long hours in a high-pressure environment—to say nothing of her brilliant native creativity, that finely honed, intuitive response of craft Eb so admired—equipped her to spearhead the operations.

He said as much to the men now and added, “Aglaia’s practical experience includes membership in professional associations, extensive participation in stage costuming at the national level, and reception of several prestigious awards.”

“Yes, she’s got some notches on her belt,” Jerry said, taking the file from his partner. “I see her work is even internationally represented—in Paris, at that. However our background checks show a real gap in her credentials. We want to be honest with you, Eb. Your company’s up against some pretty well-educated competitors.”

“You’re talking about Platte River University, I suppose,” Eb said. The older gent protested but Eb wasn’t probing. “This isn’t Hollywood. Our fishbowl is small enough that everyone here knows who’s in the game. As far as Aglaia goes, she’s got a concrete record of success that far outweighs theoretical learning. Her natural aptitude is highly regarded and we can provide recommendations from several organizations she’s served.”

“With luck we’ll be around again to meet her,” John said. “At any rate, your financials look solid but, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, our contracts aren’t awarded on the basis of price alone. We like to get a good feel for our prospective suppliers on a project of this magnitude, where local, unknown companies like yours work in tandem with our own crews.”

Eb’s familiarity in bidding for projects his branch had brokered thus far had been significantly less rigorous than RoundUp’s demands, but then a lot of money was in play with this contract. He glanced over the list of evaluation criteria the visitors offered, and when the student brought in the coffee, Eb poured both men a cup. He passed sugar and cream to them and longed for a sip of Darjeeling or Ceylon, but contented himself with java. He answered their questions frankly and supported his claims with verifying records, hoping to convince them of Incognito’s technical merit, flexibility in fulfilling on-the-job requirements, and sustainability of service objectives. They asked to view Aglaia’s full portfolio, and after a short tour of the facility, they took their leave. Eb begged his student volunteer to make him a spot of tea and retreated to his office to put his feet up.

He’d done his best but there was no guarantee about the outcome of the bid Incognito had submitted. Headquarters, insisting that Eb pass all the applicatory information through them for vetting before submission, would criticize him for not introducing their Canadian point man through teleconference as requested—unless Eb won the contract. Then all would be forgotten on that front, and he and Aglaia could get down to work.

And work was what Eb prized—not for the way it occupied so much of his time but for the way costumes communicated meaning deeper than the physics of fabric and thread. Throughout history clothing spun a story; from the earliest record it wove its own plotline. Take the biblical record of Joseph, Eb thought as he tested the heat of the tea with the edge of his lip. Joseph was a dreamer like Aglaia whose dreams got him into trouble, too. His robe paralleled his life story: Given to him by his father as a mark of favored status, it was stripped away and used to fabricate his death, but Joseph was eventually adorned again with robes of royalty when he rose to great power as a political leader in Egypt.

The story encouraged Eb in his everyday work, even in this bidding process with RoundUp he was undergoing for the sake of Incognito and, particularly, for the sake of Aglaia. You’ve stuck with humanity through thick and thin, he said silently now to God, in our affluence and our misery. You saw Adam and Eve shivering naked and wretched beneath fig leaves; you watched as Esau allowed his brother to swindle their father by putting on the hairy hide of a goat. If you exemplified your grace through costume in the days of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, then surely your grace extends to a couple of costume makers in twenty-first-century America.