August 23, 1933
It was dark by the time Clarence delivered us to the hotel in Morgantown, to what now felt like the height of civilization. We wished him a good night’s sleep and made our way through the lobby to a small breakfast room, where two covered plates waited at a small table: spaghetti and meatballs Nora had arranged for the desk manager to bring from the diner before it closed.
“You think of everything, Nora,” I said as we fell into our chairs, exhausted.
“Well, we have to eat,” she said.
My back ached and my eyes felt heavy as sandbags, but I wasted no time in twirling my fork in the steaming pasta and relishing the sweet onion and beef. The manager brought me a telegram that had come in from Harry Hopkins. The first page was a message about my report—I KNEW YOU’D BE PERFECT FOR THE JOB—WELL DONE. H.H.—and the second contained my upcoming itinerary. After Morgantown, I was on to Kentucky, and then, in a few weeks, upstate New York and New England. The thought of more travel, with crowded buses and dingy hotels, sounded awful. I already missed Prinz, the panting pillow of him on my feet. For now at least, I told myself, Nora and I were together.
For every three bites I took, Nora took just one and chewed it slowly, lost in thought. She gave me a distant smile. Her collar drooped and her hair was a wreck. “Hick, it was as awful as you said it would be. I have never seen anything like it.”
“Isn’t it?” I said. “It makes me so angry.”
“Me too,” she said, staring into the middle distance once more. I might have thought our shared outrage would draw us closer. But Nora had spent the day treating me with such impersonal professionalism. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.
“Well, we can be sad and we can be angry,” she said, pushing the still-half-full plate away and dropping her napkin beside it. “But feeling things won’t help those people a bit. It only matters what we do.”
“And what is that?”
She opened her mouth to answer but then stopped. She met my eyes, finally, and gave me a half smile. “Hick, this is the perfect place to launch the housing program I’ve been talking about for years. I’ve been thinking of it all day. I can see it now, how I might present the idea to Franklin. I won’t say more yet, but I have a lot of work to do tonight.”
“That’s all right,” I said, trying not to be hurt that she wouldn’t confide in me yet. “I don’t mind if you work. I’m so tired, I think I could sleep through the sound of ten typewriters, much less one.”
“Oh … ,” she said. Her hand was on the table, but it didn’t come any closer to mine. “I went ahead and booked a second room.”
My face fell before I could stop it.
Nora glanced over at the desk manager out in the lobby, who seemed absorbed in the task of sorting phone messages. She lowered her voice. “You know I’d rather stay with you. But I needed to make the trip look legitimate. And plus, I didn’t know how long you would be staying, when you need to move on to your next assignment.”
Of course, she could have asked me those questions, coordinated her plans with mine. But she hadn’t. I wondered if I’d made some misstep along the way, on our vacation or here in West Virginia, that had caused her to retract. What an awful feeling, to be punished but not to know what for.
I plastered a smile on my face. “It’s okay, Nora. I understand.”
After two big glasses of bourbon, I spent a sleepless night in my hotel room, rising twice for water to wash away the salty tang of the tomato sauce and then twice more to use the bathroom. Even with the small window wedged open, the room was stuffy, and I flopped from side to side on the bed, trying to get comfortable. My exhausted mind shuffled through a jumble of images. The sores on the children’s skin morphed into the flesh of apricots, sticky sweet sirens for the flies. Nora’s white, sweat-soaked blouse became the ash in the New Brunswick clearing where we’d seen the aftermath of the forest fire. My thoughts returned to the walk to Ruth Johnson’s tent, but each dirt path I turned down in my mind led to my childhood home in Bowdle. When the alarm clock rang, I felt as though I had never closed my eyes. I called Nora’s room and told her I had a terrible headache and that she and Clarence should go on without me. Then I pulled the covers over my head and finally slept.
Around two in the afternoon, she knocked on my door. I wiped the sleep from my eyes and let her in.
“Good morning, Hick,” she said, her smile warmer than it had been the day before. She set a mug of coffee and a turkey sandwich on the dresser and kissed me. “How are you feeling?”
“Better,” I said, and it was true. Both the kiss and the sleep had done me good, and I was relieved to have skipped act three of the opera of human suffering that was playing out in these mountain towns. I had seen enough to last me the rest of my days.
“Well, eat that, have some coffee, and then get dressed.” She opened the curtains and began tidying the bed with an efficiency that made me chuckle. I marveled at her. How was it that she was still here, still unnoticed by reporters? How was it that the president hadn’t sent out the cavalry to bring her home? The answer, of course, was that FDR knew better by now than to argue with his wife. Once she had made up her mind to take on a project, neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities could separate that woman from her aim.
“Hurry up.” She clapped her hands with deathly cheer. “There’s something I want to show you.”
Twenty minutes later, we were sailing in her convertible southeast of Morgantown on a shoulderless paved road that dropped off on each side into deep gullies. The prospect of one of her tires slipping off the road and stranding us in the middle of nowhere kept my pulse racing. Here and there, we saw a shack or a roadside stand heaped with onions from someone’s garden, but for the most part the winding road was empty as it cut through the deep green hills. I inhaled the scent of honeysuckle and the lush trees baking in the heat; behind us a cloud of dust curled up to the sky.
“Where are we going?”
Nora turned to me and smiled. “You’ll see.”
I could sense we were climbing in elevation. The air felt cleaner here, and there was more light than there had been down in the mining camps. An incongruously grand farmhouse came into view, surrounded by dilapidated outbuildings and a sprawling verdant meadow. Nora slowed the car and pulled off to the right. When she got out of the car, I followed and stood beside her with my hand shielding my eyes from the sun.
“This is a farm owned by a man named Richard Arthur,” Nora said. The meadow was full of grasshoppers that sounded like a hundred hissing radiators. “It’s about a thousand acres, all within Preston County. Before Mr. Arthur owned it, and before the man before him, a man from Virginia named John Fairfax did. He was a close friend of George Washington, I’m told.”
I gaped at her. The big empty land was giving me the willies. “You didn’t bring me all the way out here for a historical tour, did you? Because I wouldn’t be surprised if that field is full of snakes.”
“Better than bed bugs and lice,” she said. “What I’m trying to tell you is that this land has pedigree.”
“Wonderful,” I said. “Let’s put it in a telegram to the DAR. Now can we get back in the car?” The sun was blinding and I was still a little hungover, more from my unsettling dreams than the booze.
Nora didn’t move. “Important things happen on land with pedigree. I believe in that.”
“Meaning … ?”
She sighed at my dimwittedness. “Mr. Arthur is quite behind on his taxes.”
My ears perked up then. “Is that right?”
“Yes, indeed. And for about fifty thousand dollars, he will sell the government this farm, including all its buildings, to save himself from going into foreclosure.”
“And what would the government want with this old farm?” I asked. But I had an idea. I felt a little shiver whisk up my spine.
“I guess we’ll have to call it Arthurdale, since the poor man is practically giving his land away. Each family will get a few acres— maybe five at the most to keep things manageable. A cow, a pig, some chickens, and seed. And we’ll build them a house, which I’d like to find a way for them to make payments on, so that they will own it outright someday. We need a clinic and a school. There’s an awful lot to figure out.” She turned to me. “But, Hick, doesn’t it sound wonderful?”
I thought of the terrible cases we’d seen on our tour and tried to imagine the undernourished children running in this fresh field, drinking milk and eating chicken, vegetables, bread thick with butter. I saw neat little houses with a lane winding among them, flags hanging from porches. “Yes. It does. But how will you do it?”
“I already am,” she said, and her eyes were filled with more temerity than I’d ever seen. “I was on the phone most of the night. Franklin took a little convincing, though I can’t understand why. A place like Arthurdale fits perfectly with the subsistence farming initiative he has talked about for years. Around midnight, he got the secretary of the interior to release emergency funding, and Louis is drawing up the paperwork for the sale.”
“Incredible,” I said.
“What you really need to know, Hick, is that he was convinced to say yes because of you, because of your report. The homesteading idea is part Franklin’s and part mine, but the fact that we are going to try it here, with these people from the closed mines, that part is because of the work you have done. It’s very important to me that you see—it matters, this work. It’s not the AP, but it matters.”
I stood there watching the grasshoppers fling themselves out of the grass like water dropped on a hot griddle and tried to let her words penetrate my mind. She knew I missed my old life, the job that meant everything to me. She knew I was despairing that I might have made a mistake.
Nora took her hand out of the pocket of her skirt and reached for mine. I glanced over at her, my heart ever hopeful, but her gaze had turned back to the dilapidated Arthur house as she imagined what this land would become, at the way she could use her vision to change the fate of hundreds of people. In the face of an aim so grand, I could hardly ask her to attend to my trivial doubts by taking me into her arms, by kissing me hard and long in the safety of this place, with no one to see us but the grasshoppers. But how I wanted to slip into the car and feel her skin against mine. How I wanted her to whisper to me again about the cottage she had pledged to build for us—the lace curtains curling in the evening breeze, the table spread with chintz and a half-full decanter while we talked the night away, finally unhurried, finally just we two. I felt on that country road the words of my heart welling up and nearly spoke them aloud: Oh, Nora, say that you still love me—that you always will. But instead I said nothing, my hand in hers like an offering.