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She stepped inside and covered her mouth and nose as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. It was bigger than she imagined and filthier. Templeton’s home appeared to be kept by a staff of eleven compared to the dugout.

  The musty, peppery earth filled her nose, pricking each sense to life, choking her on the reality of what they’d done in going there. She swallowed bile and cleared her throat. So her father swindled half of Des Moines out of their money? So Frank had stupidly, inadvertently helped her father do it? They were so shamed that lighting out for the prairie was a better choice? This filth was what Jeanie’s pride had gotten her. And now it was too late.

  The evacuated family—the Hendersons—had attempted to whitewash one wall—they’d tried to build a layer of sod brick walls on the inside to give it a more finished look.

  “There’s nothing like earthen bricks to cheer things,” Jeanie said under her breath. She touched the dirt rectangles where white flecks of paint clung to the occasional sprig of old grass that sprouted like thin hair on an ancient bald man. They must have run out of paint or energy and then tacked up their wagon sheet on the remaining walls.

  Though she didn’t see any, it was clear that rodents had long since burrowed into the structure, eating through the canvas, leaving ragged holes as evidence of their unlawful entry.

  “Well, at least we brought the extra wagon cover,” she said. “We can start fresh with that if we can’t lay our hands on whitewash.” She cleared her throat again to push away the suffocating anxiety. She had to find a way to make this work.

  Frank stepped behind Jeanie and looked over her shoulder at the wall in front of them. “I wanted to start off in Yankton, too. To build a frame house, to work in the bank, there with Jeremiah.” He turned her around to look out a window and she was too stunned to stop him from manipulating her like she were a puppet.

  “But after what your father did at his bank. To those people. They wouldn’t hire me.” Jeanie pushed away and brushed past him.

  “I don’t think he was alone in his stupidity.” She picked at a crispy layer of dirt that shrouded the glass panes of the window.

  “Moving forward is the only choice. We can do this, Jeanie. This is our life and as you scribble in that book of yours or mend dresses, and someday build another home, you’ll be proud of what develops. You’ll be proud. You’ll be proud of me. Think of what we’ll leave our children. Their children.”

  Jeanie pulled up a section of her dress and covered her finger to scrape harder at the dirt on the window. She couldn’t will herself to fawn over his plan, to make him feel useful and faultless. She knew she should do that, for all their sakes, but at that moment nothing helpful came to her.

  She walked to the far back of the dugout. Hanging on the wall was a dinner plate sized wreath with dried berries and flowers woven into it.

  “See,” Frank said reaching up to touch it. “The prior lady of the home was just as inclined to make this a fairy-tale abode as you. She even decorated it.”

  Jeanie slapped his hand away from the thing, plucked it off the wall, and shook it at Frank. Her stomach shuddered at the sight of it, spurring a fresh cycle of frustration and anger through her.

  “Why’re you breathing like that?” Frank stood in front of her, his face pulled in worried furrows.

  “This is not a home, Frank. It’s a hole in the crust of the earth. And this…this…thing is not…it’s a wreath made of hair, Frank. The hair of the Henderson’s—the family, who according to their welcome sign outside, apparently walked arm and arm with Lucifer himself. And I will not live with this beastly hair thing as though it’s a gesture of hospitality from the Women’s Convention of Darlington Township.” And, she could not imagine having to share such a small grotesque space with a person she disliked so much.

  Frank looked as though he’d sucked lemons as she shook the hairy thing under his nose. Then he pushed his hand through his hair, its yellow fullness flopped back over his brow.

  “It’s filthy in here. I’m not saying we need a frame home, but it would be much more tolerable to make a home with fresh sod— clean sod.”

  “Any way you break up the sod, it’ll still be dirt, Jeanie. The dugout is just temporary, to get us through one crop, one winter.”

  Jeanie tramped from the dugout flinging open the door so hard it flew from its rusty hinges. She barreled into the openness, past the children. Tommy chased after her.

  “Mama? Can we go back? I like to play cowboys and Indians, but I don’t think I like living like one. I want pancakes and steak and…”

  Jeanie heaved the hair-wreath as far as she could, hoping Tommy would leave her alone for just five minutes. He hung back and Katherine took his place, running to keep pace with Jeanie’s angry strides.

  Katherine grabbed for her hand and once their fingers were threaded, Jeanie felt small shards of anger fall away, her pace slowed, her heartbeat measured. She and Katherine grasped each other’s hands so hard Jeanie could feel Katherine’s tiny bones in her grip. She stopped walking and closed her eyes, chin dropping to her chest. She looked up to see Frank tapping his leg.

  Jeanie smoothed the front of her grubby dress then turned to Katherine, speaking loud enough that Frank would be able to hear. “I can see we have no choice in the matter. We’ve come this far and there’s no point in whining over it. But just so we’re clear, I’m not happy and this place is a shanty. And I won’t pretend it’s anything but that.” She turned to Frank. “But I won’t whine about it either.”

  He nodded, lip sticking out like a pouting child. She’d won nothing, but felt as though she was superior in saying she deemed the place a disgrace. And standing there, watching the husband she’d shamed in front of his daughter, it occurred to her that these elements—their disgruntlement with one another, her quickness to criticize, was not new. But recognizing it was.

  And, at that time, though she realized what she was doing was cruel, she was too broken to act above. So, she left things, her cutting words as they were, lingering there, ready to be wielded again when desperation came and took her over.

  “Okay, Jeanie, it’s a deal. Let’s just make it through one winter and I’ll carry the wood for a new home on my back from Yankton if I have to. Just one winter.” Frank clapped his hands before rubbing them together with the enthusiasm that was clearly bubbling inside him but was inaccessible to Jeanie.

  Jeanie nodded, knowing there was no other choice for them. “I think I just need to clean up. A bath would shed some joyful light on this abode. I’m just not accustomed to carrying as much dirt on my person as the earth carries on itself. If you could bring me some water for bathing. I think I’ll be fine.”

  “Well all right,” Frank said. “Let’s get things together. I’ll get the water and let you get to fixing up the…well, our home, and I’ll take the kids to show them exactly where everyone’s property is so they can get around unattended.”

  “Mama?” James said, “Is that all right? I can stay and help unload.” He looked at his father then back at Jeanie. She knew how much James wanted their family to be content.

  “My, my, no. You go on. I can handle the unloading.”

  “But the baby,” James said. Katherine latched onto Jeanie’s waist.

  “Listen James, darling. If this baby is meant to be born, it’ll be born while I work, not while I lay about like a wealthy maiden from the South of France. I think I’ve learned that much over the course of the last few pregnancies, wouldn’t you say?”

  James pursed his lips and shoved his hands deep inside his pockets before nodding. “Okay, Mama, okay.”

  He walked off behind Frank while Jeanie unlatched Katherine from her body and sent her behind the men with a tap on her bottom. Jeanie forced her words to be light, to cheer her family even if the sentiments wouldn’t do the same for her. Tommy had already passed by Frank, clearly loving the chance to explore.

  Maybe if they discovered that one of them belonged in a place like that prairie dugout, it wo
uld be enough for Jeanie to survive. If she could just get Tommy to forget about his damn pancakes, maybe then they’d be all right. And, as Frank’s body disappeared from Jeanie’s sight and his voice from her ears Jeanie exhaled for the first time in what felt like hours.

  Chapter 5

  And as per Frank’s suggestion, he took the children over the plains, educating them on where their homestead butted up to others, to come to know the land with the intimacy that they’d known each nook of their home in Des Moines. Jeanie hoped he remembered to walk off the acreage for corn and a vegetable garden that might yield food fairly fast.

  Jeanie’s sole responsibility at that moment was to set up house. The heat of the day pulsed down in great waves, nearly in unison with surges of cramping that gripped Jeanie’s middle. Thick gusts of wind burst occasionally filling her ears, taking away the sharpness of the heat momentarily. No matter the force or frequency of wind, the heat caused her clothes to soak into her skin as though part of her body’s makeup.

  All of this sweat and odor convinced her the attempt to wear crinoline skirts into the west was at best naïve. She hauled up the hem of her white dress and latched it between her teeth, wrangled her hands behind her waist and undid the strings of the crinoline. She pushed it down her legs and stepped out of it then dropped the cotton from her teeth. The skirt collapsed around her legs with a heavy whoosh. She wiped the powdery dirt from her mouth with the back of her hand and said a short prayer to the God she didn’t really believe in that jumping a person’s claim wasn’t a step in the direction of the decimation of their dreams.

  Jeanie looked around the space and saw nothing and most importantly, no one. She hauled up her skirts and pushed her pantaloons down letting the breeze cool her legs. Even knowing in her head how hot the air was, lifting her skirts lowered her temperature by ten degrees at least. After a short time she pulled up her pantaloons and stretched.

  The cramping had lessened and in the absence of that grip she felt nearly wonderful, physically. She’d suffered countless miscarriages and two babies who were born dead since the twins were born and though accustomed to the notion that her pregnancy might not last, the thought that it might not still carried a shock. Luckily, she had the great expanse of building a home from nothing to draw her attention the minute the cramps subsided enough to forget what they might mean.

  Jeanie stood atop their dugout shading her gaze from the elephantine sun. Even through the bonnet, it crisped her scalp like flour in a skillet. Since the children were with Frank, it gave her a chance to concentrate on her work without wondering if someone was getting swallowed into the great vastness.

  God, it was vacuous, filled with a lot of nothing. Why would someone happily, willfully go there, Jeanie thought. Surely, everyone who did, had a tale of woe like hers, surely no one chose to live there. Even in the obvious beauty of the open land, Jeanie’s emptiness, the sadness in losing everything, felt appropriate for land like that.

  Frank, she thought, take care of the children. Please don’t fade away, forget where you are, what is at stake. Jeanie sipped water sparingly from her blue tin cup and headed toward the wagon to begin the business of setting up house. She’d done it once before—at the barely ripe age of fifteen. Though even at that age, married so young, she functioned like a woman twice as old, knowing exactly what to purchase and where to place it and who to hire to carry out her wishes.

  Twelve years later, she couldn’t rattle away the image of herself, standing in front of her home, awaiting her furnishings, primly attired, hat tilted just so and dress pinching her waist where it was fashionable that year. She cracked a smile at the thought. Perhaps she had been trying too hard to prove—screaming out with her actions—she was not a child though her age only whispered she wasn’t.

  But, the truth was like a beating. Looking back she saw, nearly every achievement was the fruit of dumb luck—being born into a family that had every luxury and wouldn’t allow her brainless elopement to ruin her standing in the community.

  She recalled her father’s response to the elopement. It wasn’t to shun her as she feared. He pretended he orchestrated the whole shebang himself. Jeanie’s mind spun the images—the parade of wagons that stopped in front of the mansion, the way each groaned with fine furnishings. The wedding gifts—twelve china and silver place settings, silken bed coverings, a velvet lounge and their family jewel, a smallish carved piano, along with other household items—symbolized something lovely in its use and also in its meaning. To Jeanie, having all those things meant life intended good things for her and Frank.

  And, for over a decade, that was exactly the way things went. That very day she and Frank moved into their graceful home, her father and his best friend, Mr. Tumulty, watched as she gave orders, smoothed over discrepancies, and kindly orchestrated the mass of furnishings into an inviting home. She impressed Mr. Tumulty, owner of the Des Moines Register, so much so that he offered her a chance to write a homemaking column. Jeanie’s opinions read like controlled tornados with powerful bursts of words that made her readers feel simultaneously chastised and capable of everything Jeanie said a fine housewife should accomplish.

  But that time had passed for Jeanie. There on the prairie, she chortled at her hubris. She scoffed at how she had sauntered through life unknowingly walking a tightrope that until she fell from it, she’d been unaware her life had been strung on a single tenuous thread.

  She told herself to get to work. Jeanie hiked up her skirt, tied it into a knot with her pantaloons exposed for all the prairie to see and hopped into the wagon. She spit at her black boots, their ugliness. In the back of the wagon she wedged her feet in between her mama’s faded, though still crimson trunk, and surveyed the spare cargo.

  Jeanie tried to unload the wagon, but for the first time since it happened, she allowed herself to recall every wretched inch of the events that occurred two weeks past.

  Nausea gripped her as images of the residents of Des Moines popped into her mind. Elizabeth wearing Jeanie’s sapphire necklace. The calm, but chilling anger in Mr. Kaplan’s eyes. Lawyers and policemen roping off her home, claiming and proving that Jeanie and Frank owned nothing they thought they had.

  A fly buzzed at Jeanie’s ear. She smacked it away. She shuddered, fully realizing she could never afford to entertain memories of her past again. There was no time to sit and mourn anything. If you weren’t moving on the prairie, you weren’t surviving.

  She had to accept that. Her father sure had moved on. He killed himself and left Jeanie and Frank to take the consequences for all his misdeeds. Kaplan had followed Jeanie and Frank to the Renaults, attempting to explain his part in the looting. His voice was gentle in submitting to Jeanie that her father’s opium habit had been his undoing.

  Opium? Jeanie scoured her mind for evidence of such a thing. She’d never seen her father stumble, sleep during the day, inarticulate. If he died from opium it must have been a one-time instance Jeanie had thought. Kaplan had read those silent thoughts and assured her that some opium eaters indulged for years with no one knowing the better, before it took control and made the user lose his soul and heart, to cause him to hurt those around him.

  Then, she did remember. Her father, dashing into her water closet to freshen up, emerging as though, well, as though spurred by an outside energy, ready to clobber the world. Her father’s gaze cloudy, his mind slow as he processed the world around him. Jeanie had always attributed it to him being a thinker—lost in the world of his own mind. How stupidly her own mind worked to allow such things to happen right in her own midst. And Frank, he had gone along with things, with her father.

  Luckily Frank hadn’t been industrious enough to mastermind any portion of the downfall, but still the facts were there. Frank had participated in the family’s misdeeds by allowing her father to continue his stealing, suggesting empty investments, building useless air castles out of baseless dreams. Frank was always happy to entertain such thoughts while his hand was in someone
else’s pocket. She hadn’t fully realized that until that ugly day Mr. Kaplan stopped by to explain.

  Jeanie began to feel dizzy. She collapsed onto the trunk in between her legs. Her thoughts crashed through the defenses that had allowed her to ignore, to overlook to forget. Sitting there, face in hands, a scent rose from her boots, sour and foreign. She gagged at the thought that the beaten shoes held the sweat and stink of another woman. A woman who’d run screaming from the prairie.

  Jeanie sat disoriented by the odor of the shoes, the stench somehow conjuring the very person who’d once worn them. She bent over her knees willing the nausea away. She could feel the woman’s dampened spirit and smell her failure. In having to wear that woman’s shoes, Jeanie was wearing another woman’s catastrophe. Head in hands, crying at the thought she might give rise and shape to a stranger’s demise simply by wearing her shoes, bringing the failure to bear in her own life, Jeanie thought she might not be able to carry on.

  Sweat pulsed in concert with Jeanie’s heart. She pushed her sleeves up and gripped the sides of the wagon. Invisible particles of dirt rose from the plains, and adhered to her skin instantly as though the filth seeped from her skin rather than settling in from the air. She shuddered, crippled by self-pity, heaving tears, grunts and sobs that echoed in the wagon and she figured, carried over the land.

  Jeanie threw her arms out to the universe then clawed at her own skin, the pain seemed separate from her mind. She stomped her feet like a child, digging her heels into the wood floor of the wagon with all the strength she could muster.

  She could see herself critically, having a temper-tantrum like a spoiled ninny, but was unable to stop. She was surprised at the force of what she had kept inside, almost without her knowing. And by the end of her fit, she’d taken fun in wailing as obnoxiously as possible—screaming out like an animal.

  This gave way to laughter. And her mind, satisfied at having won out over her lacerated heart, knew that none of the incidents in Des Moines mattered. A flash of her father came—he’d taken money from good people, promised to hold it in his bank and somehow not fulfilled that.