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Time turned to the reassuring tune of the prairie.

The steady click of the windmill’s sails, the squeak of the rusted iron weather vane on the barn roof, the satisfying flap and flutter of bedsheets drying on the line, the creak of the hand pump as Emily drew water for cooking and washing and bathing.

She enjoyed the physical challenge. She didn’t mind the ache in her muscles when she fell into bed at night, glad to feel the effort of another hard day’s work.

It was a different tiredness from that she’d felt after a day on her feet at Field’s.

That had been a nagging weariness. This was satisfying exhaustion.

She was beginning to understand the prairie, beginning to fit in and to belong.

The air smelled ever sweeter as the late-spring meadows put on their Sunday best and the first crops of wheat and corn began to grow.

Henry tended the green shoots like a proud father.

Emily was equally in thrall, measuring the height of the stalks each week and recording their growth on a chart.

She lovingly cared for the vegetable patch she’d planted beside the house and was surprised at how thrilled she was by the first green shoots of onions and beets, salad greens and potatoes.

They planted an orchard of cherry, plum, peach, and apple trees, following government advice to farmers to add trees on their claims as they would return moisture to the air through evaporation.

“In three to five years we’ll have our first crop of fruit,” Henry said as he pressed the freshly dug soil around the base of the young trees.

“Five years! I wish everything didn’t take so long.”

Henry laughed at Emily’s impatience. “Farming is like marriage, Em. A long-term commitment. But imagine it—the best apple pie you ever tasted. Made with our very own apples.” He pulled her into his side.

“I wonder what we’ll be doing five years from now.

How much the farm will have grown in that time—and us.

Maybe there’ll be little hands to help pick these apples.

” He looked at her with hope in his eyes. “Nothing doing yet?”

Emily tensed a little, as she always did when he brought up the subject of children. “Not yet.” She pictured a perfect coil of apple peel and heard the cries of delight around the old oak table. “I wish Mam could see all this. She would have loved it so much.”

Henry placed an arm around her shoulder. “You should write to Annie. Invite her to come and see what we’ve done with the place. Invite Nell, too. It’s about time I met your big sister. Heck, invite everyone!”

He was so proud of what they’d achieved, eager to show it off to anyone who cared to come and look. But Kansas was so far from California, and while Chicago wasn’t as long a journey, Emily made excuses on Annie’s behalf, claiming it would be difficult to travel with a small baby.

“Maybe when we have everything more established,” she said. “I want Annie to arrive to golden fields of wheat as far as she can see.”

“You want to prove that she was wrong to doubt us, you mean.”

Emily smiled, acknowledging the truth. Henry knew her too well. “Perhaps.”

“Write to her, Em. Annie won’t mind if things aren’t perfect, and I know you’re dying to see Dorothy again. I’d certainly like to meet my niece before she’s all grown up and married!”

Emily did want to see Dorothy, but something made her hesitate.

She was almost afraid to see Annie again: afraid to acknowledge the tension that had simmered between them, and what she knew Annie was hiding from John.

As long as Annie was in Chicago, it wasn’t Emily’s problem.

She could pull the curtain over it, pretend it wasn’t real.

If Annie visited, she would have to confront it.

She picked up her gardening tools and started to walk back to the barn. “I’ll invite Annie. In time. There’s no rush.”

—

By the time the gentle promise of spring had given way to the wild-rose-perfumed air of June and the heavy heat of high summer that followed, Emily could hardly remember life before the prairie.

She threw herself fully into her new life, taking pleasure from the hand-to-mouth simplicity of it all.

Sunshine, rain, fertile land, seed. Her sun-kissed skin and weathered cheeks were evidence of her hard work in the fields, and the calluses on her fingers were well on their way.

Laurie Miller admired them like a proud mother and said she would have the hands of a real farm woman by the fall.

But it was inside, within the walls of their humble little home, that Emily found herself increasingly happy.

Henry had built them a good solid house, but Emily made it a home.

She was surprised by how much she enjoyed the domestic aspects of prairie life, even though she enjoyed being with Henry in the fields.

She could hear Annie laughing at the pride she took in lifting a perfect pie from the stove, the care she took choosing fabric and ribbon at the general store, her patience in hemming curtains for the windows and pasting a pretty paper to the kitchen walls.

She’d chosen a pattern of wildflowers so that she could have flowers in the house all the year round.

Henry appreciated her hard work. He noticed the little touches she added and the care she took.

“You’re a natural,” he said as he helped her to ladle jam into jars. “You never told me you were a talented cook.”

“I didn’t know I was.”

She’d learned the skills by osmosis, from years of watching her granny and mammy mend and darn, stitch and sew, cook and bake.

She had a light touch with pastry, knowing that the trick was to work quickly and not to let her hands get the mix too warm or to overwork it.

She instinctively knew how to crimp a pie, how to salt a ham, how to sterilize jars in the stove, how to make a pickling liquor for beets and onions, how to preserve lemons, and how to check for the telltale crinkle of perfectly set jam.

Soon the larder shelves were well-stocked for the winter.

Her industriousness was an antidote to the challenges the colder months would bring.

With tornado season having passed without any major event, it was the threat of winter snowstorms that loomed.

The well-stocked larder offered assurance for the barren months ahead.

For now, the greatest threat came from prairie fires.

It took nothing more than a spark from a lightning bolt to set the tinder-dry grass alight.

Emily had seen how easily the land could burn and how quickly the flames raced across the prairie, fueled by grasses and tumbleweed.

Prairie folk like the Millers and Ike West still talked about the terrible fire that had ravaged the Wisconsin logging town of Peshtigo some fifty years back.

Henry plowed a firebreak around the house and Emily learned to use wet gunny sacks to beat back any small fires that jumped the break.

“They won’t be much help for your scarecrows, though,” Henry teased. “They won’t stand a chance if a fire rips through.”

The scarecrows were a regular sight across the Great Plains, standing tall among the ripening crops. Emily had enjoyed stuffing Henry’s old shirts with straw to make them. She’d given one plenty of extra stuffing and christened it John.

“Don’t joke, Henry. The thought of fire terrifies me.”

“We need the fires, though. It’s how the prairie keeps itself alive, dying and regenerating to become healthier and stronger. As long as we’re prepared, we can have both: a healthy prairie and a farm that’s protected.”

Henry was right, but Emily knew that it wasn’t an equal relationship. Nature was far cleverer than them. It could easily outsmart them.

—

Every Thursday, Emily and Henry drove into Liberal and went their separate ways: Henry to the saloon to talk business with the farmers, Emily to the Supper and Not Much Singing Club, as she called it.

The farm women were an odd group of unlikely friends, thrown together by fate and circumstance, but they complemented one another well.

They prayed for one another at church, watched one another’s kids, fixed one another’s hair, swapped clothes and worries over jugs of peach tea and thick slices of cherry pie.

Despite living many acres apart, they came together as a community in the same fond way Emily remembered among the Irish community in Chicago.

These women reassured her when doubt crept in.

They encouraged and inspired her, and entertained her.

Like her, they struggled and succeeded as the months passed and the seasons turned along with the great spades of the farmers’ plows.

Like her, they worried and hoped in equal measure.

The prairie women were a force when they came together.

She imagined she would rely on them a lot over the months and years ahead.

Warm summer nights also meant whist drives and other card games and dances in town on Fridays and Saturdays.

Festoons of electric lights illuminated the streets and bootleg hooch flowed as the band struck up a tune and the men and women shook off the working week, losing themselves to the intoxicating whump of the double bass and the exuberant trill of trumpets.

Emily loved those sticky summer nights when she and Henry danced a prairie jitterbug beneath a ripe strawberry moon and the smell of the just-harvested winter wheat infused the air.

Prairie folk were thriving. They had money in the bank and enough wheat to feed the nation.

Prices were holding steady at around a dollar a bushel, and the new machinery meant more acres could be quickly plowed up, and more seed planted to bring even greater yields the following year.

As Henry stepped on her feet they laughed and stumbled into other couples, and in those heady carefree moments she forgot about the secrets she carried, and her heart was light and hopeful.

The issue of motherhood didn’t preoccupy Emily as it did the other women in town, and Henry hadn’t mentioned the subject for a while.

They were both too busy to think about anything much apart from the crops and the animals, too exhausted most nights to even think about making love, the eager passion of their first weeks as newlyweds having settled into something more relaxed as they each grew in confidence and familiarity with each other’s bodies.

Month after month she bled, meeting the familiar dull ache in her belly and the dark stain on her underwear with quiet relief.

She wasn’t ready to raise a child. Not here.

Not yet. Perhaps ever. She scrubbed at the stains with lye soap against the washboard, the water turning muddy brown as Mother Earth reclaimed what was hers.

If she couldn’t start or sustain another life, or harness the primal urge to become a mother as so many other women seemed to, she would put her love and energy into Henry and the farm.

Life on the prairie was so all-consuming, so vast and immersive, that at times Emily almost forgot that any other place existed beyond the Great Plains.

News of the outside world reached Liberal in the pages of the Kansas City Star , delivered to the general store once a week.

Emily read the stories as if reading about another world: female aviators trying to break records the men had set, stocks and shares soaring, Al Capone’s latest scandal, politics and government.

She felt so removed from those people and events and was glad to have left it all behind.

Until a letter from Annie brought it all rushing back.

Dear Em, I’m slowly feeling much more like myself. We will come to visit next month when the worst of the summer heat has passed. You won’t believe how much Dorothy has grown!

Suddenly, Emily wasn’t ready to see Annie at all.

She felt so fiercely protective of everything she and Henry had built, and while she desperately wanted Annie’s support, she was also afraid of her response. Would it live up to Emily’s descriptions? Would Annie think it all rather basic?

And there was something else.

Emily was afraid of how she would react to seeing Dorothy again.

She’d tried to put the child out of her mind—had been too busy, frankly, to think about her often—but the memory of the infant in her arms, and the way the child had looked at her, had never left her.

What if Dorothy reminded her of the child she’d lost, and had kept from Henry, and couldn’t seem to give him again?

And there was also the issue of Dorothy’s appearance.

What if she looked nothing like John? Would Henry remark on it?

And how would she, or Annie, react if he did?

Annie and Dorothy’s impending arrival felt like an approaching storm that threatened to upend the perfect little world she and Henry had built, and there was no cellar to shelter in this time.

This storm was one she would have to confront head-on.