PENNY WAS IRONING in the sweltering kitchen when she heard the automobile. Looking out the screen door, she watched a battered Model T come to a stop in a blaze of dust. Something clutched her throat. The Nelson gang drove around in a Model T. She remembered Mr. Renfew's warning about how they had roughed up the Stadler girl. Rough up, mess up —all the words that people used because they couldn't say the real word. A sense of helpless fury settled on her as her eyes moved toward Phoebe in her basket. She was about to scream for Cora when she saw the men spill out of the car. There were seven of them, dark and foreign-looking. She noticed the luggage strapped to their car roof.
Cora stepped into view, approached them with confident strides, and held out her hand for the men to shake. They fell into a half-circle as Cora spoke to them, pointing to the shed where her grandfather's old thresher was housed. She swept her hand toward the fields. The men nodded.
Penny let out a long breath. She had panicked for nothing. Those were the Mexicans, come to help with the harvest. She had to stop spooking herself over every piece of gossip she heard, otherwise she'd shriek and faint the next time the ice deliveryman knocked on the door. After setting the iron back on the stove, she took Phoebe from her basket and stepped out on the porch. Cora waved, gesturing her to come and join them.
She and the men were speaking in a flood of incomprehensible words. It took Penny a moment to figure out it must be Spanish, the language of Cora's childhood. Cora's face was flushed and animated. "Penny, I'd like you to meet the Ramirez brothers. This is Antonio." Cora took the baby so Penny could shake his hand.
"Pleased to meet you, miss." He spoke with a heavy accent. He was the oldest of the brothers, she guessed around thirty. He flashed her a smile before turning his attention back to Cora, who introduced her to the others. The youngest was a solemn, smooth-faced boy called Javier. Penny decided he couldn't be much older than she was.
Cora explained that the Ramirez brothers had been coming to her grandfather's farm for the past five years. "I told them about Grandfather passing away," she whispered.
Nothing in the men's faces betrayed any alarm at Cora's appearance. Perhaps in deference to her recent loss, they seemed to regard it as understandable that she had to wear men's clothes and do men's work in order to provide for herself and her daughter. Cora held up Phoebe so everyone could get a good look at her.
"Bonita," Antonio murmured, gently touching the baby's cheek. Penny threw a bewildered look at Cora, wondering how she could let a strange man touch her daughter, but Cora just smiled at him. She hadn't cut her hair since Phoebe's birth. Now it was growing out, softening the contours of her face. The change had come too gradually for Penny to notice until that moment when she saw Cora and Antonio looking at each other.
Antonio and his brothers slept in the hayloft in the clean bedding Penny dug out of the linen chest. Everyone ate together, packed around the kitchen table. Penny had never worked so hard, feeding nine people at every meal. The first night she used every burner on the stove, cooking up fried chicken, mashed potatoes, string beans, and dumplings. Flies buzzed around her in the ninety-degree heat until she tacked up more flypaper.
The following morning she cooked a breakfast of pancakes, bacon, eggs, and hash browns. She had hardly finished washing the dishes when she had to start preparing lunch. It took three loaves of bread to make the sandwiches. She baked four dozen cookies and made two canisters of lemonade, then loaded everything in a wheelbarrow and delivered it to the field.
In preparation for supper, she took the hatchet from the woodshed and marched to the chicken coop. She grabbed a fat capon by his feet, severed his head in one clean stroke. Then she brought down a second one. She didn't flinch or feel particularly sorry to see them dash around headless, leaving behind a bright trail of blood. Taking them by the feet, she dunked them into a bucket of scalding water to help loosen the feathers. Plucking the birds was tedious but routine. Gutting them was the foul part.
"Oh, ish" she muttered, slicing into the birds' bellies. She worked quickly, using a sharp knife. The blood sprayed her apron. Then she held her breath and reached inside the warm cavity to yank out the intestines. She had been doing this since she was twelve. The Hamiltons used to keep chickens in their back yard. Her mother had laughed at how squeamish she was in the beginning. "If you like to eat them, you shouldn't be so prissy."
After cutting the disemboweled birds into pieces, she washed them with soap and warm water, another trick she had learned from her mother. You had to think of all the dirt and droppings at the bottom of the chicken coop. When Penny served freshly butchered meat, she made sure it was clean.
While the capons roasted in the oven, she went into the woodlot to pick raspberries for the pies she planned to serve after supper. She dragged Phoebe along, mosquito netting draped over the top of the baby carriage. The mosquitoes bit Penny instead—the blood on her apron seemed to draw them. Slapping her arms and legs, she tried to fill the berry pail in a hurry.
A movement in the bushes caught her eye. As the mosquitoes whined around her, she stood absolutely still. There it was again—a rustling in the underbrush. Someone or something was backing clumsily away.
"Who is it?" she called out. "Who's there?"
Only silence welled up, along with the sense of staring eyes concealed behind the tangle of leaves. The inside of her mouth turned sour with fear. Dropping the berry pail, she grabbed the baby carriage and bolted for the house. Only when she reached the back yard did she stop and look back at the woodlot. Shaking all over, she breathed hard, but the trees were as placid as ever. She heard a redwing blackbird, then a mourning dove.
Wiping her sweaty hands on her apron, she decided it had probably just been a raccoon. Or one of Antonio's brothers answering the call of nature in the bushes, something she'd been doing herself that day. The single bathroom in the house and the outhouse in the yard were not enough for nine people. Yet as she trudged back into the woodlot to retrieve her abandoned berry pail, she couldn't escape the notion of hidden eyes watching her. She thought about the stranger in the white suit at Renfew's, the way he had gawked at her and Phoebe. But what would a well-dressed man like that be doing in their woodlot? The thought was so foolish, she had to laugh at herself.
The rest of the afternoon she spent in the kitchen, rolling out pie dough, peeling carrots and potatoes. She made a pot of gravy and a pot of string beans with pearl onions; shucked and boiled corn; made a salad with wilted lettuce and fresh mint leaves. Every farm wife prided herself on her harvest spread, and if any woman dared to present anything less than a feast, people would grumble behind her back, call her a stingy shrew. The farmer got all the glory; the farmer's wife got all the work. If the harvest went well, even the people who didn't like Cora would nod to her in approval when she brought in her wheat to be weighed and sold at the grain elevator. Everyone would say she had proved herself, even if she was a bit strange.
Penny doubted that anyone would ever mention this meal she was cooking. The moment it was finished, her work would be devoured and forgotten. That's the way it was with women's work. It kept getting undone—the clean dishes dirtied, the laundered diapers soiled. No glory in it at all. No wonder Cora had chosen the role of the man. Penny imagined cutting off her braid, putting on a pair of overalls, and never having to cook another harvest dinner.
In the heat of the kitchen, she raced the clock, hoping to have everything ready by the time the men returned from the field. Banished to Cora's bedroom, Phoebe howled and whined. Penny gritted her teeth and went on working.
While Penny dished out the supper, Cora laughed and spoke with the men in rapid Spanish that seemed to transform her tired face. Even in her grandfather's overalls and work shirt, she did not look like a man but a woman, a vivacious woman whose laughter made the teacups tremble on their hooks. Penny didn't know what Cora had told the men about her circumstances or Phoebe's father, but she read in the men's eyes that they did not see Cora as an outcast or a madwoman. Everyone fussed over Phoebe, passing her from lap to lap. If the baby cried, the brothers crooned and sang. Especially Antonio seemed to worship her. Bonita, bonita.
Once or twice, Cora glanced in Penny's direction and translated something one of the brothers said. "Pablo loves your chicken." But for the most part, Penny felt as though she wasn't there. She was invisible, the silent faceless hired girl who had cooked this meal and would stay up late washing dishes.
After the meal was finished and the men stumbled off to the barn to sleep, Cora told her they had clothes that needed washing. "Would you mind doing their laundry tomorrow?"
Her head bent over the sink, Penny nodded, stifling an irritated sigh.
"They'll thank you for that," Cora said. "Living on the road, it's hard to get their clothes decently washed." She helped with the dishes until Phoebe began to cry a few minutes later. "Oh, she's hungry again," she murmured, disappearing upstairs. Penny finished the dishes alone.
The next morning, to the accompaniment of Phoebe's wails, Penny washed seven pairs of overalls, stiff with dirt; seven shirts, pungent with sweat; seven pairs of socks and underwear that had been through more than she cared to think about. As the geese paraded across the lawn, she hung up the sopping clothes to dry. Her back and shoulders ached and her fingers were raw. For supper she would have to butcher another two capons. But the geese seemed confident in their knowledge that they were too big and intimidating for her to take on. With their glittering black eyes, they seemed to be sizing her up.
Phoebe was asleep upstairs when Penny heard the knock. The screen door framed the slim form of a young man she had never seen before. He looked about nineteen and had light brown hair and tawny eyes that locked into hers when she opened the door.
"Hello, miss. Name's Gilbert. Come to see if you need any help getting the harvest in. I saw the smoke from the thresher when I was coming up the road." The sweat that glistened on his cheeks told her that he had walked from town.
"I'm the hired girl," she told him. "You need to talk to the woman who owns the farm. She's already got seven men helping her." It seemed an awful pity that he had come all this way for nothing.
"What's your name, miss?" His eyes on her face made her want to run to the mirror and comb her hair.
"Penny," she flustered. "Penny Niebeck."
"Penny, my family used to have a farm over by Mankato, but you know how hard it's been. Lost my big brother in the war. My old man died of the Spanish flu. With him gone, we couldn't make our payments to the bank, so we lost our land. I'll be real plain with you, miss. I just want to earn a dollar or two to send home to my mother." He ran a hand through his hair and smiled at her sheepishly. "Your boss must have some kind of work for me to do."
The smell of roasting capon filled the hot kitchen. For a moment she was dizzy. She read the hunger on his face. If his eyes, darting past her into the house, seemed a little too inquisitive, she told herself it was simply his predicament. "Stay for supper." She led him in, pulled out a kitchen chair, poured him a glass of cold lemonade. "When my boss comes in for supper, you can talk to her yourself."
"So what's it like working here?" he asked between swallows of lemonade.
"Not too bad." Reluctantly she turned back to the sink and the colander full of potatoes she had to peel. "But cooking for the harvest hands is sure a lot of work."
"And now there's one more mouth to feed. Here, let me help you." He got up from his chair and took a potato from the colander.
"There's only one potato peeler," she said.
"Then I can peel potatoes while you do something else. Want to see something?" He took the peeler from her hand and moved the blade over the skin in one deft movement, producing an unbroken spiral of potato peel.
She looked at him in amazement. "I could never do that."
He dangled the piece from his fingers. "Didn't girls used to use potato peels for fortunetelling?"
"Fortunetelling?" She laughed in disbelief.
"They threw the peel back over their left shoulder. When it landed on the floor, it spelled out the first letter of the name of the boy they'd marry."
"You're pulling my leg." It was impossible not to return his smile.
"Ancient secret of the Gypsies. Go on, Penny. Give it a try." He handed her the peel.
"Here goes!" She tossed it, not backward over her shoulder but neatly into the slop pail.
"Aw, Penny, why did you do that?"
"I'm not in any hurry to get married." She went over to the pile of string beans she had to clean.
"So you're independent. A modern gal, eh?"
She smiled to herself as she snapped off the ends of the beans. "I'm not going to be a hired girl forever. One day I'm going to school to be a nurse." In her excitement, she snapped a bean in half. She realized she had just made a confession both to herself and to a stranger. The ambition, planted over two months ago by Dr. Lovell, unfolded and fell like a flower into her outstretched palm.
"A nurse," he said. "You'll go live in a city."
"That's right. One day I'll go to Chicago. What about you?"
"Oh, I don't want to talk about myself." He cocked his head. "So how old are you, Penny? You look kind of young to be cooking the harvest dinner."
She tried not to act offended. "Fifteen."
"You must be going to high school in the fall then. Does your boss drive you into town?"
"I don't go to high school."
"Don't go to school!" He nearly sang those words. "Well, how are you going to be a nurse if you don't even go to high school?"
Penny snapped the beans briskly. "I'll go a little later. When the baby's older." That was the danger of speaking dreams aloud. People could just tear them down.
"Baby?" Now she had his full attention. "What baby?"
Penny looked at him for a moment, then burst out laughing when she realized the assumption he must have made. "My boss's baby."
"Your boss has a baby? So you take care of a baby on top of all your other work. Well, that's a heap of responsibility."
She smiled shyly at him. His honey-colored eyes seemed to bathe her in light. With his sleeves rolled up, she could see the muscles of his arms moving as he peeled the potatoes. When he caught her staring, he grinned.
"You're awfully pretty to be stuck out here on this farm. You like your boss? Is she nice to you?"
"She's all right."
"Does she pay well?"
Penny nodded.
"Well, I should hope so." He stepped a little closer. "This place is so far away from anywhere. Do you ever get to have any fun? Go to the picture show? You like going to the pictures?" His eyes moved over her face.
"I love Houdini." She blushed a little when she said the word love. "If I was a man, I'd want to be like him."
Gilbert laughed. "Oh, go on! You don't want to be a man. You said you wanted to be a nurse."
Before Penny could answer, the screen door opened and closed.
"Who is this?" Cora demanded, looking from Gilbert to Penny. "Who is he and what's he doing in the house?"
"Name's Gilbert, ma'am. Come to see if you need any help with the harvest." He didn't seem nearly as startled by the sight of Cora in her grimy overalls as Penny had suspected he might.
"Penny, where's the baby?" She spoke sharply. "Upstairs?"
Penny nodded.
Cora pressed her mouth into a hard line. "Come with me."
Penny threw a helpless look back at Gilbert before following Cora to her bedroom, where Phoebe lay asleep in her basket.
"Her nap's not over yet," Penny whispered, but Cora picked up the baby and started pacing the room with her. Woken too early, Phoebe began to cry. The bedroom curtains were drawn against the heat. In the corner, an electric fan whirled, stirring Cora's hair. Even in the dim room, Penny could see the strain in her face as she rocked her daughter and kissed the top of her head.
"Don't ever do that again." Cora spoke with a vehemence that made Penny tremble. "Don't ever let a stranger in the house without telling me first. Promise me."
Penny's throat was so dry and tight it was hard to speak. "His family lost their farm. He just wants to work to send a dollar home to his mother."
"Penny—"
"You don't know what it's like." This time she spoke defiantly.
Cora let out a breath. "I don't know what what's like?"
"To have nothing." Penny couldn't look at her. "Some people have nothing."
Phoebe stopped crying and fell back to sleep in her mother's arms. The fan lifted the curtains, making them stir and flutter like angel's wings. Apart from the grind of the fan, it was absolutely quiet.
"Penny, you have to promise me." There was something in Cora's face she had never seen before. A glimmer of fear that made her blink.
"I promise," she said. And that look vanished.
Cora stepped forward and handed her the baby. "You hold her. I'll go down and talk to that fellow."
Though she remained in the bedroom, Penny could hear their voices clearly. Had Gilbert also been able to hear Cora and her talking about him? She listened to Cora softening as Gilbert told the story of his family losing their farm. If it weren't for her grandfather's ten thousand dollars in the bank, Cora also stood to lose her land if grain prices continued to fall. "I suppose we could always use an extra set of hands," she said at last. "But I can't keep you on after the harvest is finished."
At supper Gilbert sat beside Penny, while Cora took her place at the far end of the table. She and the Mexicans chattered in their rapid-fire Spanish.
"You know what they're saying?" Gilbert asked.
Penny shook her head. "It's all gibberish to me."
"Sure must be funny," he said. "Listen to them laugh." Cora was too caught up in her conversation to notice the way he stared at her. "She seems awfully friendly with those fellows, don't she?"
He turned to Penny again. Sitting up a little straighter in her chair, she smiled and was about to ask him how he liked the food when he cut her off.
"You ever seen her in a dress?"
"Cora? No." A trickle of sweat moved down her ribcage, making her squirm on her chair.
"You're kidding!" He laughed. "Are you trying to tell me she wears those overalls and boots every single day?"
"Yeah." Boredom crept into her voice.
"She have any suitors? You think she would, a young widow with a big farm."
Penny sighed. "Why are you asking? You want to marry her?" She stared past him to the strip of yellow flypaper coated in wriggling bodies.
"You'd think she'd want a man around."
"You better eat your supper before it gets cold."
But he wasn't listening anymore. Penny grimly gnawed her drumstick. Gilbert had just been fooling with her. Cora was the beautiful one. It was obvious in this room full of men. Even her overalls couldn't hide that.
Gilbert didn't offer to help Penny in the kitchen anymore but followed Cora around everywhere he could. Although she seemed to tolerate him, Cora didn't encourage him. Penny had to give her that. Cora didn't pay any special attention to Gilbert at all.
The day they finished the cutting and threshing, Penny left the chicken in the oven too long. It came out stringy and tough, but no one seemed to notice. Cora built a bonfire in the back yard. Antonio got out his guitar and started to sing a ballad that sounded as if he were weeping and then laughing. His brothers joined in, every voice in harmony. Gilbert hung around the edge of the bonfire circle while Penny went back in to wash the dishes. Cora disappeared down the outside cellar door, then came into the kitchen with six dusty bottles. When Penny figured out what was inside them, she dropped her dishrag, which landed in a wet heap on her shoes.
"My grandfather was a Dutch Calvinist," Cora said, laughing at Penny's shock, "but look at what that old devil had hiding away." Six bottles of California wine.
"That's against the law."
Cora grinned. "When you're finished, come and join us. A little wine never hurt a person."
Rubbing the gray dishrag over the plates, Penny listened to the music. Part of her longed to join the circle around the fire, but the other part of her refused to sit cheek by jowl with all those men, who would just ignore her and gaze moon-faced at Cora. And Cora herself had turned into a stranger who served liquor.
After she had finished the dishes, she sat by the window with the baby in her lap. Her untouched glass of wine rested on the sideboard. Rocking Phoebe, she listened to a new song, one high clear voice rising above the rest. Cora's voice, the first time she had ever heard her sing. The Spanish words fell from her tongue like sparks. Something rose in Cora's voice, something filled with yearning, as she wove a melody that was tragic and joyous at once. The word ave came again and again like waves lapping the beach.
Cora trusted those Mexicans enough to show them a side of herself she'd never shown to her. An ache welled up inside Penny, a loneliness that sank into her bones until her shoulders heaved. She was sobbing. She wished she had someone special. A best friend, a sweetheart. A memory enveloped her, of her mother braiding her hair. They had been laughing together over something. How long had it been since she last heard her mother laugh like that? Ave, ave, ave. The song tapered off.
When Cora finally came in, she was still singing under her breath, too flushed with wine and laughter to notice Penny's swollen eyes. "Why did you stay in here? You could have joined us, you know." Her winy breath touched Penny's cheek as she leaned forward to take the baby from her arms. Penny said nothing.
"Good night," said Cora, shrugging at her silence. She turned to carry Phoebe upstairs.
"Cora."
She swung around again, her eyes widening a little.
"That song you were singing." Penny swallowed. "Was it about the Virgin Mary?" Immediately she cursed herself for asking such a stupid question.
"What song?"
"The song with ave in it." Penny felt her face grow hot. "Like 'Ave Maria.'"
Cora laughed softly, her hand cupping the back of Phoebe's head. "Ave means bird in Spanish. The song was about migrating birds." She retraced her steps to Penny's chair. "Reach in my left pocket."
Penny looked at her in confusion.
"Go on." Cora smiled. "Reach in. I don't have a free hand."
Mystified, Penny stuck her hand into Cora's pocket and pulled out a little wooden bird with outstretched wings.
"How do you like it? Javier carved it for Phoebe. Wasn't that sweet of him?"
Penny traced the wooden wings with her fingertip.
"You're tired." Cora looked at her with the kind of expansive, indulgent smile she usually reserved for her daughter. "You should get some sleep." She carried Phoebe upstairs.
Lying in bed, Penny studied the pattern the moonlight cast on the wallpaper as it sieved through the lace curtains. Everything was quiet, yet the melody of the ave song played itself over and over in her head. There was a word for what she had witnessed that night, looking out the kitchen window toward the bonfire, listening to Cora's voice traveling on the cool night air. What was that word?
Happiness.
"Ave, ave, ave," she whispered, rubbing her face against the pillow. The wooden bird rested on her bedside table, its wings stretched in eternal flight. When she finally fell asleep, she dreamt of Canadian geese soaring overhead, their dun bodies like the undersides of clouds.