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Dark clouds rumbled in the northwest. Addie parked her bicycle in the shed and checked on the chickens. They eyed her with heads cocked and feathers astir.
“You girls know a storm’s coming, don’t you?” A communal cackle swept the coop like the women at a Ladies Aid meeting. Outside, she surveyed her garden. At their lush peak, the vegetables encroached their boundaries. Melon vines intertwined with mature potato plants, and flowers trespassed straggling bean rows.
Pride burst in her at the string beans hanging low on the bushes. She smoothed a tomato leaf between her fingers, simply to enjoy the clean scent.
The living room window revealed Harold frozen in place near the radio. With every porch step, Addie’s head throbbed. Deceiving him couldn’t be right, yet Jane’s injunction still swirled. If only she could talk about this with Kate, she’d feel better. Even so, she could hear her instant response.
“Jane’s right, and you wouldn’t disobey a lawyer’s injunction, would you? Even I wouldn’t do that.”
At midnight, a cannon blast split the sky. Addie hurried into her robe and lowered the south window against a driving wet wind that sent notice: summer’s oppressive heat couldn’t last forever. In each shadowy room, she shut south windows as wildness whipped through the grove.
Another boom intermingled with similar distant warnings until they blended in one long explosion. Pow! An even louder growl tore the heavens. Ever since Ruthie stood with her in the doorway whispering, “The thunder and lightning show us God’s power,” Addie had loved storms.
Lightning lit the farmyard. Then something smashed. Through the big bay window facing the yard, a brilliant flash radiated as a giant hard maple branch cascaded to the earth.
“What’re you doing?” Harold’s voice made her jump.
“Just listening and watching.”
“I’m going out to check the stock.” He rummaged on the porch for his boots and coat, and she watched him run. He might have been a child, at the mercy of forces far beyond his reckoning. Another crash jolted the house, and something scratched the back bedroom window. The next flare revealed another enormous branch torn from its moorings.
The kitchen window offered a better view. A 40-foot walnut tree—not just a branch—lay atop her garden. Ungainly saw-toothed branches held the trunk up from the ground like so many caterpillar legs. Her breath caught in her throat.
“Oh, my tomatoes, and—” Another bright stroke showed the trunk settled over her melon and squash patch.
The fruit and vegetables, beautiful and well formed, needed only a few more weeks to ripen. She had nurtured each plant until golden blossoms transformed into fledglings, folded in on themselves and thickened into infant fruit.
So many massive orangey-gold blossoms, you could hardly see the leaves. Just yesterday, she soaked some blossoms in egg and milk, dipped them in cracker crumbs and fried them for supper.
“Just like a tenderloin,” Mama used to say.
Maybe in the morning things wouldn’t look as bad as she thought. She didn’t even hear Harold come in, so he startled her from her reverie. “That big walnut tree almost hit the house. But we’re lucky. Other than that, there’s not much damage.”
“Yes. Lucky.” Her words drowned in another thunder roll and Harold reached for the light switch.
“Power’s out. I’m going to try for another few hours of sleep. You coming?”
“In a little while.” She turned back toward the window.
“Worried about your garden?” He answered for her. “You are, aren’t you?” His accusation matched the flop of his arms at his sides. “Don’t you realize that tree could have walloped the house? And for all we know, the corn crop’s ruined, or the soybeans flattened.”
He filled his lungs. “But you only think of your garden. You’re sick, you know.”
Something tugged at Addie’s insides. He knew what her garden meant to her. I’ve known Harold Bledsoe since before he could walk, and he’s always been willful. Even if he thought of all her gardening as a waste, didn’t he still eat its produce?
He snarled. “You have no faith, that’s your problem. That’s why we don’t have children yet.”
She swallowed down his meaning and blinked back tears as he climbed the stairs.
In the next 15 minutes the storm subsided, so she reopened the windows and stood a bit longer, massaging her thumbnail. Then she crept to the davenport. Ragged branches waved across a slim moon in a breeze so gentle no one would ever know a storm had swept through.
At the grain elevator tomorrow, farmers would discuss the results. “This late rain made the corn crop,” they would say, or “A man just can’t win. I lost my lower 40 acres of corn last night.”
A nameless sensation, cold and insistent, squeezed Addie’s chest and banned sleep. She’d felt alone before, yet this was different. Her mind rebelled, a ball of gray yarn in her head.
Think about something happy. Myrna Loy Day came to mind, and all her giggling with Aunt Alvina and Kate. But her heart still ached.
Then Jane’s advice flowed through the living room on the breeze. Practice a little faith. If only practicing faith were more like practicing the piano, with clear results.
v
August heat blistered the daylilies with brown scabs and rendered Old Brown even more lethargic. He languished under the porch this morning.
At midmorning, heavy haze still hid the sun. Cobwebs laced the window screens and created little dewdrop tents in the grass. The humidity sucked up every drop of moisture and gouged deep cracks in the earth. Leaves curled in on themselves in survival mode.
Bushy growth now hid the damage to the melon patch. Mr. Lundene and another farmer pulled away the walnut tree the morning after the storm, the garden looked better than Addie imagined, with some crushed melons and tomato vines, but more that survived.
Yesterday, she stumbled through a patch of thigh-high weeds west of the grove. If she whacked them off now, snow might not linger so long there next spring. Over the scythe’s hiss, she heard her name. Past the garden, she rounded the house corner as Berthea joined Harold behind the tractor. She helped out sometimes, yet rarely donned Orville’s trousers. But today, thick denim touched her boots—this must be serious.
Harold pointed to the power take-off attached to the tractor. “Look here, Ma. All you have to do is push this lever down when I wave. I’ve locked the four-sided casing, see?” He pointed to the metal cover. “The shaft can’t come loose, so there’s nothing to fear.”
Berthea worked her lower lip. “This makes me nervous.”
“The power take-off makes a lot of noise, but it won’t fall apart.” He squinted his eyes at her. “Would you rather we spend 20 dollars hiring a man for the day?” He crossed his arms and glared down his nose.
Berthea’s sigh melded with the machine’s roar.
“All right, then.” He turned to Addie. “I need you up in the haymow.”
Glad she put on overalls to ward off mosquitoes in the grove, she trekked the alleyway. Unfortunately, the overalls snagged on barbed wire coils strung beside the barn ladder, and she had to tear them loose.
Harold motioned her near the open haymow door. “The elevator drops the bales right here.” He toed the spot with his boot.
“When a bale peaks over the elevator, shift it to the side. I’ll unload 20, shut the machine off and come up to stack them. You just need to get each bale out of the way before the next one comes.” He glanced down at Berthea. “If Ma can hold her own, we’ll get this done in a couple of hours.”
Each bale weighed about 40 pounds, but Addie used her leg muscles to steady herself. The heavy mist finally lifted into perfect blue sky, and Berthea held her footing down below.
From the hayrack situated a few yards from the elevator, Harold tossed a bale onto the conveyor belt and waved to Berthea. The power take-off’s ear-shattering racket reduced Berthea to a gnome. All of her recent cheerfulness vanished. From Addie’s 30-foot vantage point, her mother-in-law looked small and vulnerable.
Harold said Orville, slow to accept time-saving innovations, had conditioned her leeriness toward new inventions. But Berthea could see the elevator’s value, so she rode along to Benson to order it last month. Yesterday the implement company delivered the slanted metal monster resembling a giraffe’s neck and head.
Harold’s arm strength made up for any lack of agility and transferred the second bale to the elevator with ease. Addie planted her feet, slipped her fingers under the twine and hefted its weight over the haymow lip. She pushed it as far across the wooden floor as she could and readied for the next bale.
Thirteen bales crossed the lip before one entered the conveyor crooked. Harold failed to notice, but Addie threw out her hand in an automatic reaction. Visualizing the domino effect darted fear through her. She shrieked, though she knew he couldn’t hear.
“Harold, that bale’s cattywampus!”
He’d already bent to retrieve the next one, but she couldn’t just stand there and watch. She made a megaphone of her hands and screamed again.
“Berthea!” Somehow, Harold heard and turned in time to see the misaligned forty pounds gain altitude. Then it nosedived off the elevator toward Berthea’s head.
The next 30 seconds, like a scene from a silent movie, cast him in the star role. Seconds before the bale flattened his mother, he intervened.
His knees dipped, and his shoulders bore the weight. The bale glanced off his left side, and he regained his footing as the would-be killer bounced on the ground. The twine split, cascading hay across the yard in a fireworks display.
Aware of something amiss, Berthea flipped the lever. The urge to shuttle down the ladder and smother Harold with hugs overwhelmed Addie. This was the strong man she married, the guy who taught himself to kick a football after his coach counseled him not to sign up for the team his freshman year.
Instead, he gave himself to kicking and not only made the team, but kicked the winning point in three close games. In the process, he won the heart of every Halberton girl.
“What I wouldn’t give to feel those biceps around me,” one of Addie and Kate’s classmates swooned when Harold passed them in the hallway. Muscles did little to attract Addie, but after Harold introduced her to his parents, Berthea pulled Addie aside one day.
“Come over here by the corncrib.” Knobby indentations marred the paint, like deer markings left from rubbing their itchy nubs on the uneven boards in springtime.
“Harold flung himself at the corncrib every night after supper to toughen himself for football practice. See where his shoulder protectors hit the boards? He threw himself at the crib all summer long for four years.” The story increased Addie’s admiration.
Now, Berthea wiped her forehead and yelled up to the haymow. “We need a break—I’ve got roast beef for sandwiches.”
Harold gathered the wayward hay, retied the twine, and threw the bale on the hayrack. Addie maneuvered down the ladder and caught up with him at Berthea’s steps.
“That was amazing.”
His eyebrows met in a frown. “Stupid, you mean? I ought to have been more careful.”
He opened Berthea’s door, his profile lost in shadow.
“Your quick reaction saved your mother’s life. I saw the whole thing, and it seems impossible that you got there in time.”
“Oh sure, a real modern-day miracle.” His sarcasm pierced her. “You coming in or not?”
Something still urged her to hug him, but since the night of the storm, he had pushed her away. She turned toward their place with a sigh.
“I need to check my apple butter. I’ll eat some leftovers at home.”
He shrugged and slammed the screen door behind him. Addie trudged across the yard, her feet as heavy as lead weights.
The apple butter she’d simmered since dawn drew her inside. The recipe required a full day, so she began the process last night, washing and quartering two pails of Golden apples from the trees in the fence line behind the farmyard.
Early this morning, she drained the salty water and set them to simmer in her deepest pot. Gradually, they turned into rose-colored mush, giving the kitchen a heady, mellow scent. Every time she came in to stir the mixture, she added cinnamon, and sometimes a tablespoon of butter.
With her overalls stripped off like fetters in the noonday heat, the sweet, spicy aroma drew her in. In another few hours, the batch would be the perfect texture for spreading on toast. On this stirring, she added a teaspoon of cloves and tapped at a few translucent skins with her paring knife, their original color now given over to the whole.
Mama pressed the sauce through a sieve to remove the peelings, but Berthea said they added consistency, and if they cooked long enough they disappeared into the butter. With rationing, Addie left out the sugar, which made little difference in taste.
Harold disliked apple butter, but she’d already made him two apple cobblers and frozen three pies for a rainy day. She pictured him at Berthea’s table wolfing down roast beef sandwiches right now, and batted back tears. Why wouldn’t he accept anything she offered, even praise?
Her stomach growled, so she sliced a piece of whole wheat bread and set it in the toaster. Tsk, tsk, tsk. The sound brought Norman to mind, and while she waited she imagined the wood in this room painted white.
Slathered with butter and the hot apple mixture, her toast became a feast. Harold would never taste sweet cream butter and homemade apple butter like this, never appreciate this slow simmering treat.
“But I do, and surely that counts for something. I might take some to Jane after supper tonight. I just might.”
