Chapter Three - Unnamed LMS VII Novel

A/N: Thank you for reading to Chapter 3! This one was a little difficult as I had to research everything having to do with 1930s farming. We actually talked about that exact topic in my history lecture about an hour ago, so we'll see what many edits I'll have to make in the future. As always, any and all comments are welcomed! I post weekly updates of this story here.

It had become Eduard’s habit to stop for gas on the corner of Cody and Hawk before making the final leg of his journey to the farm. He recognized the attendant that was serving him, but whether it was from his last visit or his childhood, he could not remember. The man blew bubbles with his gum as he filled the truck’s tank and told Eduard the latest of his life’s happenings.

“My dog—a blue heeler—just had puppies. Six of ‘em,” he said. He would recount the same story to a dozen more customers that afternoon. “You in the market for a blue heeler puppy?”

“Is the father also a blue heeler?”

The attendant blew another bubble. It popped before it reached the size of a walnut.

“He can be—” he said before choking on his next word. He had something of a stutter. “—whatever you want him to be. We don’t know who the daddy is.”

Eduard shrugged as he counted the coins. He was leaning against the side of the Chevy. Sweat condensed on his brow as the sun centered itself in the cloudless sky. His shirtsleeves were practically rolled up to his armpits, and his suspenders hung loose at his sides.

“I’ll be coming back around tomorrow evening. Maybe I’ll want one by then.”

“They’re four dollars a pop. Three for the girls.”

“How much for the gas?”

“A dollar sixty-eight.”

Eduard tsked as he pulled an extra dime out of his pants. He dropped them in the attendant’s outstretched palm. The blond worker threw the change into his shirt pocket without counting them.

“Don’t forget,” he said as Eduard walked around to the driver’s side. “Gas rationing will find itself here by the end of the year.”

“I know.”

“You said you’ve come here from Omaha?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Well, I’d count on cutting back on the hundred-mile drives in the near future. Yankees out East have already made them impossible.”

“Thank you for the warning.”

Less than two miles remained on his drive, but it was the longest stretch of the day. The truck crawled down Aksamit Street, past the ten shotgun and Victorian homes that made up the town’s only residential block. Instead of a farm, the homes’ owners spent their free time manicuring their lawns so that they looked straight out of a magazine, despite the adverse climate. Eduard’s foot hovered over the gas as he passed the sole house on the west side of the street, where one of the Wasson’s children lived.

He turned right onto County Road K, but everyone just called the stretch of it in town “Main Street.” For two blocks, two-story brick buildings lined the sidewalk, creating the town’s social scene. A third of the buildings were empty, but businesses and restaurants still filled the first floors of most structures. There was the drugstore where Eduard had worked as a soda jerk for three winters; he had had to walk almost a mile there and back every day. The general store sat at the intersection and was catty-corner to the movie theater that had moved in last year. It had one screen and a capacity of forty people, and attracted everyone in the town at least once a week.

Old man Klement’s bookstore, which sold books along with any other miscellaneous object he wanted to sell, was the last establishment on the main drag. Every time he came home, Eduard stopped there to drop off new releases that he had just finished reading, and this Saturday was no different. Mr. Klement insisted on giving Eduard ten cents for every used book, which Eduard would just give to Mary to spend back at the store.

“These really are my best sellers,” Mr. Klement told the younger man as he flipped through his copy of The Moving Finger. “You bring me these copies a month before I can get them on the shelves myself.”

“Well, I’m sorry I only have three this time.”

“Eddie, you never have to apologize to me,” the older man replied. He patted the pile of books before readjusting his spectacles. “As long as your sister keeps coming here and buying up my books, you and me are in the clear.”

A random assortment of coins and candy found themselves back in Eduard’s possession. He walked out of the buildings and into his truck. People, most of them figures of Eduard’s childhood, milled about the storefronts as the weekend settled in. He observed how their features had changed as the truck rolled past. The wrinkled farmers were a little more grey, and their children a little taller.

Almost a mile of road stretched between the edge of town and Schovajsa Road. A sea of yellow and jade cornstalks surrounded the pavement, towering over the squat vehicle and its occupant. A few rogue laborers milled about and checked the plants. The distant end of the road melded into the empty blue horizon. 

Eduard glanced at the passenger seat. The letter that he had received the day before stared back at him. Its return address had been torn away, but he knew where to find its sender. He steadied one hand on the wheel as he stuffed the letter into his overnight bag. 

The Wasson’s catalogue home broke the homogenous scene, surrounded by its mowed yard and ancient trees. Speckles of algae covered its north side and darkness consumed the windows. Mr. Wasson was tinkering under the hood of his car through the open garage door. Eduard honked his horn twice as a hello.

Eduard sped as he neared the Dostals’ house. Its gabled roof and brick walls rose over the Earth and filled his windshield. Wind rustled through the fields and combined with the cattles’ chatter, filling Eduard’s ears with the song of his youth. The livestock walked along the fence to his left as they followed the truck with their beady eyes. A phantom pain shot up his right arm. He gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white.

A child emerged from behind the house as Eduard turned into the driveway. Even at eight, little Hedvika resembled her namesake as closely as a deathmask. Like her mother, her skin appeared tight over her frame, and her dress hung loose over her gangly figure. As she bounded towards her brother, her auburn curls bounced around her face.

“Eddie, Eddie, Eddie!” She exclaimed with a speed that would drive most people mad.

Eduard jumped out of the car. His little sister ran up to him, embracing his legs. He patted her on the head.

“Eddie! You have anything for me?”

He laughed and returned to the car. He opened his weekender. Next to his clothes, a small paper bag protected a mixture of lemon drops and lollipops from the morning’s journey. He poured some of its contents in his sister’s hands. She squealed and began unwrapping her favorite: a tootsie pop.

Eduard followed Hedvika through the front door of their home. The interior had changed little in six years, let alone six months. Their carpet had been replaced, but its replacement differed only in age. His mother’s vase still sat on the table in the entry and was filled with a fresh bundle of goldenrods. Next to it was the telephone that Mr. Dostal bought a week to the day after his wife died.

“Eddie?” A woman’s singsong voice rang from the kitchen.

“Mary?” Eduard replied in the same tone.

His middle sister appeared behind the stairwell, wiping her calloused hands on a stained apron. A piece of cloth wrangled her hair into a pile on the top of her head, making her equal in height to her brother. Eyebags blemished her otherwise youthful face. Her dress matched the green hue of the cloth on her head, and she wore no pantyhose under it.

“It’s good to see you,” she said, taking his overnight bag. She lifted it up and grimaced. “How long are you staying?”

“Until tomorrow afternoon.”

Her shoulders sank.

“Did you get Mrs. Kaplan’s letter?”

“It’s in that bag you’re carrying.”

“I really need to talk to you—”

“Later. Where’s father?”

“Father can wait. I want—”

“Mary, please. I’m only here for so long.”

Mary huffed. She turned on her heels.

“He says he wants you outside as soon as possible,” she called down as she climbed the stairs to Eduard’s room. “Might as well get some work in on your stop here.”

Eduard looked to Hedvika, who had not moved from her position against the doorframe. Her navy dress looked spotless, despite having been worn by Mary nearly a decade prior. She chomped on the tootsie pop.

“Can I have another?” She asked, the desecrated fragments of the first sucker still in her mouth.

He threw a furtive glance up the stairs before nodding with his index finger held over his mouth. Hedvika mimicked him. She began unwrapping her newest sweet as she disappeared down the living room.

The hallway to the kitchen was plastered with pictures of close and distant family members. Mr. Dostal’s family was scarcely represented, growing up too poor to take many decent photographs. Mrs. Dostal’s side hoarded the majority of the space. The largest photograph featured the two of them on their wedding day, standing in front of Mr. Dostal’s childhood home in Saunders County. That was 1921. Next to it was a snapshot from two years later: Mrs. Dostal, holding Eduard’s toddler hand in among the cornstalks. Eduard shuddered as he passed the photographs of his mother, her face younger than his behind the glass panes.

Eduard looked out the window above the kitchen sink to the backyard. The empty clothesline swayed in the breeze to the behest of the birds trying to perch on it. His father stood beyond it, crouched beside a wheel on their wagon. 

“Jak se máš, tati?” Eduard asked as he emerged from the screen door.

His father stood with a drawn-out groan. Long ago, Eduard had decided that the man in his parents’ wedding portraits and the man who raised him were two distinct people. One was perpetually anticipating a future of a happy family and years of plentiful harvest; the other was forever trapped, begging time to go in reverse.

“Fine, Eduard, just fine.”

Mr. Dostal crossed the yard to his son. At forty-four, his back stooped below its full height so that he was eye level with Eduard’s nostrils. He shook his son’s hand, then wiped the grease off of his onto his starched jeans.

“How have Mary and Hedvika been?”

“Fine, too.”

The two Dostal men examined each other over a barrier of foot-tall grass and animal droppings. Sweat stained Mr. Dostal’s linen shirt and mixed with the dirt already speckled across his face. A blue and yellow patch covered a hole on his thin sleeve, sewn in place by his wife nearly a decade prior.

“I was thinking—”

“I need you to—”

They stared at each other until Eduard diverted his gaze, and Mr. Dostal was free to speak.

“I need you to help me with this,” he said, motioning to the scene behind him. “Wagon, then the pegs. See the horses before dinner.”

Eduard furrowed his brow.

“Did you not feed them this morning?” He asked.

“What do you think I am? Dense?” Mr. Dostal waved the question away. “Of course I fed them, and milked the cows with Mary’s help. It’s your turn to help with mucking the barn.”

The older man returned to his position in front of the twelve-spoke wheel without another word. He tended to their ancient box wagon as if it was his oldest son. By the end of autumn, it would haul hundreds of pounds of corn out of their fields and into the world.

A breeze whisked through the farm, filling the air with the sound of rustling leaves and corn stalks. Everything was the same bronzed yellow, from the soil beneath their feet to the color of Mr. Dostal’s tanned skin. Even the wagon, maligned with all sorts of issues, had a distinctive jaundiced tint to it.

Eduard turned his back on his father and traced his steps back to the entryway. The house was silent, except for the intermittent creak of a floorboard. He peered out of the front window to the cows across the road. Hedvika clung to the wooden fence, her feet resting on the bottom stringer. Old Shirley, spared from the slaughterhouse thanks to her nomenclator, was licking the child’s face.

Eduard climbed the stairs two at a time. Hedvika’s three dolls lay strewn across the landing around a cast iron kettle. He hopped over the abandoned tea party and into his room.

It was there that Eduard had left his collections and memorabilia—any true testament to the farm life he led. Advertisements, clipped from national magazines and newspapers, covered the peeling wallpaper, enticing Eduard with the most alluring cars and movies of the thirties. Fred Astaire’s face hovered above his bedside, while Ginger Rogers had been long since stolen and repositioned on the walls of Mary’s bedroom. Eduard took a rock from the collection scattered across his dresser and, tossing it over in his hand, dug through the drawers for his jeans.

Ten minutes and a glass of water later, Eduard squatted alongside his father, readying the wagon for the harvest. He found his brain void of any thoughts as they worked in tandem. Mr. Dostal jacked the wagon up, while his son removed each nut and wheel. He drove a sledgehammer into the naves, removing the boxings for his father to fit into the replacement wheels. A lifetime of experience guided his arms and eyes as he labored. He blinked away images of slaughtered cattle with each swing.

Once Mr. Dostal was satisfied with the state of his beloved wagon, Eduard ventured north along Schovajsa Road with the discarded wheels, two at a time. He walked in the ditch in between the road and the cornstalks, ducking to hide his oversized body from the sweltering sun. The Wassons and Dostals shared a barn at their property line, which housed their cattle and communal horses. Over the years, the arrangement had saved them a small fortune, despite the makeshift stable being little more than grey planks and rusted nails.

Eduard dropped the last two wheels on the ground inside the barn. He fell against the wall, causing the family’s tools to rattle above him. A horse stirred and stomped its hooves.

“Eddie?” Mrs. Wasson’s voice rang out from one of the stalls. She appeared in his view just as he registered the sound. He corrected his posture. Despite the sweat and crud covering his shirt, she enveloped him in a hug.

“How are you ma’am?”

“Never better, Eddie.” The almost seventy-year-old woman stepped back with her hands on her hips. “You get more handsome every time you come back from that city, you know that? Taller, too.”

“It must be something in the air.”

“Or the water,” she chuckled. “I thought that was your truck that passed by my house earlier.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Wasson. I should’ve stopped by.”

“Do not worry about it, sweetheart. Can you stay a minute and tell me about how the last two weeks have treated you?”

Eduard looked over his shoulder at nothing in particular.

“I told dad that I would help him fix the straps on some of our husking pegs,” he explained. “He’s convinced that we can use some rubber from an old tire to replace some of them.”

“Your father is a smart man—I would not doubt him,” Mrs. Wasson replied. She paused for a second, deep in thought, before continuing. “Is there something you can do here? Surely, the pegs can wait until before dinner.”

“He asked me to muck the stalls.”

“Perfect.”

Eduard picked up a pitchfork as Mrs. Wasson led the first of the four horses out of its stall. He began sifting and discarding the manure as he described his Omahan escapades to her. He told her about the auditorium and dance halls, about playing softball after work, about Stan and Francis and Ann. He described the Meyerovichs, and the stout man in the photograph that beautiful Galina had agreed to marry. As he finished cleaning out the second stall, he drifted into the topic of his work: the cold and damp slaughterhouse, the long hours and short lunch break, and the feeling of the cattles’ eyes watching him as his mallet came down on their heads.

“How many cows do you”—she mulled over her next words—”get through in a day?”

Eduard shrugged as he led the horse back into its stall. It was almost as tall as him.

“That depends. Usually it’s around two hundred, but once in a while I reach three hundred,” he explained. Then, for no particular reason, he chuckled. “Stan says I’m the most efficient knocker he’s ever worked with. And he’s been at Armour longer than I’ve been alive.”

Mrs. Wasson nodded her head. She had sat on a bench along the wall and was crossing her legs.

“Is there anything you can think of when you are working? Anything to distract yourself from it?”

“Well, I like to think it improves my baseball swing, swinging that hammer all day.”

Eduard turned to the woman with a grin plastered across his face, only to discover her frowning and staring at her hands in her lap.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Wasson. I didn’t mean to be cruel.”

“I know.”

“I pray sometimes. Then I think of the farm and my sisters, and how they must be doing.”

“That’s nice.”

“I try not to think of our cattle.”

She nodded along.

“I suppose when I go back, I’ll be thinking about this Ann girl. Mrs. Wasson, I don’t know how else to describe her except for ‘gorgeous.’ She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

“How does she feel about you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He crossed his arms on the top of the pitchfork and rested his head. “I just met her yesterday, though I suppose I had seen her at Church before. And Stan always talks about how proud he is of her and her brain.”

“I can’t imagine that any girl could stomach the idea of a slaughterhouse,” Mrs. Wasson stated.

Eduard avoided her gaze. Her youngest child had long since grown up, but she had continued perfecting her mothering skills with the children next door. 

“Just because I grew up raising animals doesn’t mean slaughtering them isn’t a respectable job,” he mumbled.

“I know.”

“I’m lucky I got a job. One that isn’t demeaning.” 

“I know, dear.”

He sighed and moved to the final stall. He did not bother to move the horse, instead trying to muck around its hooves. The animal spun around to watch his every movement.

“Did you say that this Francis boy is a dentist?”

“Former baseball phenom, too.”

“Well, why don’t you do that?”

“Play professional baseball? Mrs. Wasson, I think you may be going senile.”

She threw a rag at him and shook her head. “No, Eddie. I mean go to college.”

With a thud, the pitchfork fell to the ground. Plumes of grime and hay floated into the air. Eduard shifted his weight and stared at the aging woman who had raised him.

“Don’t get me started, Mrs. Wasson.”

“I know plenty of people who took night classes to finish high school. And why stop there?”

She walked up to him with her arm extended, but he backed away, his foot sinking into the pile of filth behind him.

“You’re the one who put Mary up to this,” he bickered.

“I know her teacher sent you a letter, Eddie. And I know that you got it before coming back here today.”

“I don’t want to hear this,” he muttered.

“You’re smart, Eddie, even if you didn’t have formal schooling,” she said softly as he picked his tool out of the mud. “But Mary is brilliant, and she could have enough of an education to do something meaningful with it. Did you know she has been attending classes in Wilber?”

“I heard.” He pictured the new high school building in his mind, with its large bright windows and corridors filled with lockers. In comparison to the one-room schoolhouse he had frequented up until the age of eleven, Wilber High was Princeton.

“You cannot stand here and let her talents waste away on this farm, Eddie.”

Eduard spun on his heels, forgetting the mess that still covered the ground around him. His face burned as a deep pink spread across his cheeks.

“Maybe that’s just our lot in life, Mrs. Wasson,” he said. 

He took a step forward, intending to push past her through the open barn doors and into the rows of corn beyond them. But the horse neighed, and Eduard retreated to sift new hay onto the floor again. Mrs. Wasson watched him work in a trained silence, her arms crossed across her chest.

When Eduard had finished his task, he placed the pitchfork against the wall where he had found it. He pet the horse on the nose and wiped his hands on his jeans. Mrs. Wasson maintained her pose alongside the tools as the young man avoided her piercing gaze. He walked to the door with an apologetic smile that more closely resembled a grimace. The sun had disappeared behind the structure, casting Eduard and the surrounding grass in a heavy shade. A field mouse scurried into the forest of stalks at the thunder of his feet.

Five feet from the building, he turned around. Mrs. Wasson was diminutive compared to the dilapidated barn, which stretched beyond his vision into the heavens. 

“Sorry, ma’am,” he said, his voice cracking.

“I understand, Eddie.”

He lifted his arms in surrender and shook his head, his mouth agape.

“I just don’t want to be the one to stay here.”