Lizzie
My father and I stood side by side, staring out at a wide, flat field. Every now and again, he wheezed or released a cough that sounded as dry as the earth. A haze of dust lingered across the field and all around us, but there was nothing subtle about it this time—a brown fog had blown in. It would take time for that dust to fall back to earth and longer to clear from our lungs.
“It’ll rain now,” Dad said, nodding with satisfaction toward the field we’d just plowed. “Sure as anything. Rain follows the plow, sure as sunset follows the sunrise.”
This was one of Dad’s good days, so I didn’t point out that his theory had well and truly been disproved. We’d plowed straight after the harvest in ’30, ’31, and ’32, but we hadn’t had decent rain in years. I nodded as if I believed him, but I didn’t know what to believe anymore.
“Are you two going to stand around all day admiring your handiwork, or will you bring the tractor back to the barn so I can take a look at that dicky disc?” Henry called.
Dad and I turned toward the sound of my brother’s voice and found him strutting toward us.
“Why does that boy always look like he just invented ice cream?” Dad muttered. I nodded in bewildered agreement. Much as I adored my brother, I rarely understood him. Henry was born with a uniquely sunny disposition and a charm that meant he could talk his way out of any scrape. That was fortunate, because he also found his way into more scrapes than most.
“Well, aren’t you two peas in a pod,” Henry laughed when he neared.
“Plowing is dusty work, Henry,” I reminded him. “You wouldn’t know because you’ve never done any.”
He threw back his head and laughed, then waved a hand vaguely toward my dusty body.
“I didn’t mean because you both look like someone buried you alive. I meant because you’re both standing there with your hands on your hips. You’re even wearing that scowl you both love so much.” I glared at him, and Henry laughed again. “Are you done with the tractor? I have a date with Betsy tonight, so if you want to plow again tomorrow, I need to get started now.”
I liked Betsy and I wasn’t jealous that Henry had someone special. Despite our dire financial situation, he still went out several nights a week to see her, but I didn’t begrudge the gas he used driving the Model T into Oakden. They’d been dating for over a year and Henry had wanted to propose for almost as long.
I’d been on enough dates these past few years to have quietly decided that romance wasn’t for me. I liked simpler things—the feel of sandy dirt on my skin after I plowed a field, the joy of a new foal’s birth, the sight of those first green shoots breaking through the soil as the wheat seeds germinated. There was nothing I enjoyed more at night than to sit out under the stars, taking cautious sips from the bathtub gin Henry secretly brewed in the barn, enjoying the silence of the high plains with my brother by my side. But admittedly, on nights Henry was out with Betsy, I felt awfully lonely. I had no idea what I was going to do when he finally had the money to marry her.
“You can’t take the car tonight,” Dad said abruptly, turning toward the tractor.
“What?” My brother’s trademark smile slipped into a frown. “But, Daddy, me and Betsy were—”
“We need to save the gas.”
Before Henry could say another word, Dad climbed up and started the tractor. The engine roared to life, and without delay, he drove it past us. I coughed as the tractor sent a fresh wave of dust over me, and it was Henry’s turn to scowl.
“I can’t even call her to tell her I’m not coming,” he grumbled, shaking his head. Dad said we couldn’t justify the monthly service fee to have the telephone connected. “What’s gotten into him? Today didn’t seem like a bad day.”
“Maybe he’s just tired from being on the tractor for five hours.”
We started walking back toward the house in silence, until Henry muttered, “It might be the wheat, you know. Judge Nagle told me last night that even the best crops were only fetching sixty cents per bushel.”
“What would he know? He doesn’t know a single thing about farming, as far as I can tell.”
Judge Nagle was Betsy’s dad, and the wealthiest person we knew. As the little northwest Texas town of Oakden had grown over those past few decades, he’d purchased and rented out most of the town’s new commercial properties. The Nagle family attended the Oakden Methodist Church, the same as we did, and I’d known him long enough to notice he was prone to condescension when it came to those of us who grew the food he ate.
Henry pursed his lips but didn’t say anything, so I pressed on. “Dad said it didn’t matter that we didn’t even harvest a thousand bushels because the price would be higher.”
“I remember what Dad said. It made no damned sense at the time, but I trusted him because he seemed so sure about it. The papers say that people in the cities don’t have any money now with this Depression. They don’t even have money for food. The price of wheat changes based on demand.”
“What happens if we really did only get sixty cents a bushel?”
Henry shrugged, then aimlessly kicked a rock in the soft dirt beneath our feet as he walked.
“I don’t know. I guess we try to sell the tractor.”
I stopped dead in my tracks.
“No,” I said flatly. Henry gave me a pained look.
“Lizzie, there’s not much else to sell.” Betsy’s family lived in a two-story house just behind the courthouse in Oakden, and her home had multiple living areas and indoor plumbing. We didn’t even have electric lights and I considered myself lucky that the outhouse was closest to my bedroom so my midnight runs to the bathroom were short. Every step counted on those bitter winter nights. I knew we were humble folk, but I’d never thought of us as poor.
“Don’t panic yet,” Henry reassured me. “I’m just guessing. You said today was a good day, right?”
“You know as well as I do that good days have nothing to do with money or with harvests or anything else,” I muttered. Dad’s bad moods weren’t the usual kind of bad mood. They didn’t only come on when things were bad, and they didn’t always go when things became easier.
Henry shrugged.
“Let’s ask him later. At dinner, maybe.”
“But what if he says we need to sell the tractor?”
“Then we sell the tractor and we make do with the horses for a year or two until we get a better crop. It has to rain sometime, and when it does, the yield will go back up and the price won’t even matter as much.”
Just as I’d been doing for my entire life, I took comfort in my brother’s confidence. I was soon too busy feeding the animals to worry, anyway. Henry fixed the wobbly disc on the plow, and Mother made navy bean soup for dinner. But as she was clearing the table after we ate, Henry cleared his throat.
“How much did the wheat fetch, Daddy? Judge said even top condition grain was only fetching sixty cents a bushel.”
Mother froze, her hand still extended toward my plate. She flicked a panicked look from Henry to Dad. Then she forced a smile and said, “Let’s not talk about that now—”
“Yes. It’s true,” Dad said. “Top grain got sixty cents. We got forty-two.”
The words fell like a bomb into the middle of the room. Henry and I sucked in air, and Mother sank back into her seat, resting the plates on the table in front of her chest.
“Will we sell the tractor?” Henry asked quietly.
“Can’t,” Dad said abruptly.
I was immediately pleased that a tractor sale was out of the question, but still, I clarified, “Can’t? Won’t, you mean.”
“No, Lizzie. We can’t,” Mother said quietly. “I mean, we could, but it won’t do us any good. We owe much more on the finance than it’s worth now.”
“But...we bought it in 1929. Shouldn’t we have paid it off by now?” Henry said.
Dad huffed an impatient breath and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “Jesus Lord, give me strength. Henry, how am I ever going to send you out on your own if you don’t have the good sense to know it takes years to repay a tractor?”
“And how would I know, Dad, if you don’t tell me these things?” Henry said stiffly.
“Well, since we’re clearing the air now,” Mother began gently, “there’s a few other things you should know. We’re a little behind with the tractor repayments, and more than a little behind with the property taxes.” I gasped, and she flicked a sad smile my way. “You knew these last few years have been tough and there was a lot riding on this year’s harvest. We didn’t want to worry you with the details, but you two are adults now. Goodness, Lizzie—you’re seventeen now. Dad and I were courting when I was your age. We need to stop sheltering you.”
“You kids don’t need to worry because I’m going to see the bank manager tomorrow,” Dad said, pushing his chair back. “He’ll sort us out with a line of credit to catch up on everything and see us through to next year’s harvest. And it’ll rain soon. Probably any day, now that we’ve plowed. You’ll see, things will go right back to normal next year.”
It had been a blisteringly hot day, and with Dad out in Texline at the bank, Henry and I plowed the back field while Mother did some canning. Now the sun was low in the west, and I enjoyed the milder warmth of the sunset as I collected the eggs from the hen yard. I was sunburned, as I was most days over the summer and sometimes the winter too. Mother always said that my “pretty red hair” was a blessing. Since my favorite place in the world was out under that big Texas sky, I was constantly reminded that the ghostly white skin that came with it could also be a curse.
When I was little, I told Mother that I wanted to be a farmer when I grew up. She gave me that soft look that parents often wear when children ask for something impossible—part amusement, part pity, part fondness.
“Girls don’t become farmers, honey. Girls become farmers’ wives. That’s what you’ll be.”
Even as a little girl, that struck me as absurd. My mother was as much a farmer as my father was. If he was in the field working, she was often right alongside him, or back at the house tending that vegetable garden that was almost a farm in itself. When Dad wanted to buy the tractor, my mother sat in on every call and every meeting, and they made the decision between two models together. Mother’s temperament was made of cast iron. Nothing scared her. Nothing fazed her. And nothing was too hard for her.
Girls could be farmers. I’d seen it with my own two eyes in Mother.
I heard the roar of an engine as I set the last of the day’s eggs into my basket. Being so far back from the main road, we didn’t really get any drive-by traffic, so I knew it was Dad, and the violent acceleration and grinding gears were a dead giveaway—the meeting had not gone well.
When I went inside, I found Mother sitting at the table, a bowl of half-shelled peas in front of her. She forced a smile, but I could see the strain around her mouth. Dad was in his room with the door closed. If it was daytime and that door was closed, then Dad was in bed, and he wasn’t coming out anytime soon.
“They can’t give us the loan,” she said in a low voice. “Since the banking crisis, the manager can’t lend money as easily as he used to. We didn’t understand the new rules.” The banks had all been closed for a time earlier in the year. With the Depression worsening, there had been a panic rush of people trying to withdraw their money, and that led to a bunch of banks collapsing. The government closed them all, made sure they were viable, then reopened most of them with new rules to keep people’s money safe. “Dad thought the farm would be good for collateral, but the bank said the price of land is dropping so fast they can’t risk it. We don’t have anything else to offer as security, so...”
The truck started just then, and I ran back to the door, just in time to see Henry spin the wheels as he took it right back out the drive.
“Those boys of ours, Lizzie...” Mother sighed, shaking her head sadly. “Neither one of them has the good sense to drive properly when they’re upset.”
“Where is Henry going?”
“I expect he’ll be going off to see Betsy,” she said, reaching for the peas.
“What are we going to do?”
She thought about that for a long time—long enough that I’d taken the seat opposite her and started helping with the peas before she answered.
“You know, I really do not have any clue how we’ll do it, but I am sure we’ll figure it out,” she said at last. “This isn’t the only crisis your dad and I have navigated together, honey. When we got married, Dad wanted to expand the farm to a thousand acres and he used to say we’d need a whole lot of children to help us run it. But that first year...” She sighed and turned back to the stove, where the peas were now over heat, bubbling away beside a pan of potatoes, sizzling in bacon fat. “You know it took us a few years to get pregnant after we were married. Then we had that tiny baby girl who was born way too early, and I got so sick after she was born.”
Mother never spoke her name aloud, but I knew about Elsie, the baby who didn’t ever get the chance to breathe. On Sundays, Mother always dressed for church early. An hour or even more before we had to leave for service, she’d walk a hundred feet or so to the lonely tree on our property. In the summer of 1909, when Mother and Dad took possession of the first two hundred acres of land around that spot, she had shipped in five little Texas live oak saplings—intending to grow them all together in a row to create a shady spot for future children to play in. One by one and despite her best efforts, the first four trees died. Mother had been a typist in Chicago before she married Dad. She didn’t know a thing about growing plants until she learned the hard way on the land.
After the baby died, Dad built a little bench seat beside that last surviving tree, and he inscribed the name Elsie on the back of it. That was Mother’s remembering place. When I learned to read, I asked about that scripted lettering etched into the back of that chair. In haunting, uneven tones, Mother told me about the tiny baby girl who didn’t survive.
“The doctor came to check on me a few months after she was born. I asked him about having another baby and he looked down his nose at me and he said, ‘Mrs. Davis, some people just are not meant to be parents,’” Mother said softly. “But I knew in my heart I was meant to be a mother.”
I didn’t know how to tell her that I knew something in my heart too. I had known my whole life that I wasn’t meant to be a mother. Maybe I’d been traumatized by the way she spoke of that poor lost baby. Maybe I’d been too afraid of that heartbreaking seat beneath the oak tree when I was little, or maybe I’d indulged my fascination with farming too much, like Mother sometimes said when she was nagging at me to be nicer to the boys at church. She so desperately wanted me to find a boy to date. But even at the age of seventeen, I was certain.
The problem was, I still couldn’t quite figure out how to avoid being a mother. Henry would inherit the farm, so it seemed the only way to get my own farm was to get married. Marriage meant children, and children would mean less time for farming. More time for diapers and feeding, more time for keeping the house. Less of what I knew I loved.
“Two years later, Henry was born, and eventually you joined us too,” Mother said, her gaze softening. She waved a hand vaguely as she added, “For that first year after we lost that baby, everything felt hopeless. We were all alone in this tiny little house with that great big sadness.” She smiled, then nodded, as if she’d convinced herself too. “This moment feels just like that one. I don’t know how things will work out, but in my heart, I am certain that everything will be okay. All you and I have to do is to have faith and keep our chins up.”