Page 24

Five years later

The years blew by, carried away on fickle prairie winds that brought good harvests, record-breaking yields, and grain prices holding steady at a dollar a bushel.

More and more folk arrived, lured by the promise of the Great Plains, and millions more acres were plowed up until the nation had more wheat than it could possibly consume.

Emily attuned to the cycle of the seasons, the hot summer months that melted away to benevolent bountiful falls before the winters blew hard and cold and everyone longed for the arrival of spring and all its promise of renewal.

But it was the fall that Emily looked forward to the most, the time of year when she took a moment to gather herself after the heat of summer and prepare for the challenging winter months that lay ahead.

She felt restored by the drop in temperature and the mists that rolled across the prairie in the early morning, lending an otherworldliness to the land, as if it were letting out a long sigh.

But summer wasn’t quite done yet, and the lingering threat of tornado season lurked around every corner.

Emily had never worked harder. She stubbornly stuck with it, even when the prairie tested them.

They’d overcome cruel summer hailstorms that had destroyed entire crops, nursed sick horses and buried the stillborn runts from a litter of piglets, struggled on when Henry’s foot was crushed beneath falling logs, hunkered down in the cellar while tornadoes roared above, and navigated the treacherous months of smallpox that had taken Ingrid’s dear husband, Eric, from her and left their two children without a father.

Time and again, they’d picked up the pieces, dusted themselves off, and carried on.

Prosperity and ruin were as finely balanced as a circus performer on a high wire.

Nobody was sure which way things would fall, but nobody could look away.

That was what it took to survive here, not only to prosper when times were good but to endure when things were at their worst.

Emily’s callused hands and broken fingernails bore the evidence of her toil.

They were farmer’s hands now, hands to be proud of.

The ghost of her wedding band, lost somewhere in the fields, was marked now only by a ring of paler skin on her sun-browned finger.

Henry had offered to buy her a new ring, but she’d told him to keep the money.

“I don’t need a ring on my finger to prove my commitment to you. You’re stuck with me, remember. For better, or worse. Not that I can imagine anything ever being worse with you.”

The one constant through so much change was her dear Henry. They’d had their struggles and disagreements, but their early rule of never going to bed on an argument had stood by them and, in many ways, Emily felt closer to him than ever.

“Besides,” she said when he offered again to replace the wedding band, “I’m as wedded to the land as I am to you. It’s only fair that the earth now carries a token of my betrothal!”

It was true. She loved this ancient land with all her heart, and it had started to love her back.

The bare fields she’d first arrived to were now lush with swaying crops of corn and wheat.

Her vegetable patch was a thriving garden, providing enough produce to see them through all year round, and the fruit trees had borne their first fruit two years earlier than Henry had predicted.

She’d picked the first apple herself, carefully removing the peel in a single magical coil in honor of her mother and sisters as she remembered the old oak table, warm brown bread thick with butter, the memories as clear and bright as leaves in the fall.

For all that she loved her Kansas home, she thought often of Ireland.

More, it seemed, as the years passed. She still kept the piece of Connemara marble in her pocket—it had looked after her so far.

The larder was well stocked, and they had money in the bank to see them through a bad year or two.

Everything was just as she’d hoped, and yet she felt the undeniable ache of something missing.

Although Nell had eventually managed to make the long journey from California, spending a happy month with Emily and Henry where old affections were bolstered and new memories made with three of her boisterous children, five years had passed without another visit from Annie or any invitation to travel to Chicago.

The traditional Christmas cards, occasional letters, and brief phone calls they’d exchanged over Emily’s first months on the prairie had dwindled in the years since.

There were long spells now when Emily didn’t even think about Annie, although it wasn’t as easy to forget about Dorothy.

She often thought about the featherlight weight of her in her arms, the powerful surge of emotion she’d felt and how profoundly it had affected her.

The photograph Annie had left behind took pride of place on the kitchen dresser, but even that had eventually become a source of anguish, a painful reminder to Emily of the child she had briefly carried during the weeks before Dorothy’s birth.

She’d placed the photograph in a drawer, buried beneath the clutter of matches, pins, cotton reels, and buttons.

Despite the doctor’s assurances, there hadn’t been other pregnancies since.

Like clockwork, she bled. Month after month, she met the dull familiar cramps with the same confusing sense of relief and regret.

Even Henry didn’t talk about children anymore, didn’t ask if she was expecting. There was nothing to be said about it.

Desperate to share the complexity of her feelings with someone, she confided in Ingrid Anderssen. She’d grown even closer to Ingrid since the shock of Eric’s death.

“Is it normal?” Emily asked. “To be afraid of having a child, even when part of you hopes for them?”

“Of course! I’ve dreaded each of my children, and longed for them equally. Will I be a good mother? Will they be healthy? Can we afford another child? So many questions and doubts.”

“It doesn’t make sense. Surely if you want something, there should only be sadness when you don’t get it. Not relief.”

Ingrid assured her it made perfect sense. “Even if we instinctively want something, we might not be ready for it,” she said. “Be patient, Emily. Time will bring what you need.” She wiped a tear from her eyes. “And, sometimes, it will take away the thing you cherish the most.”

Emily drank coffee on the porch that evening as she watched the sunset.

She thought about Eric and Ingrid, and how quickly life can change.

With the community so tightly knit, any tragedy affected them all.

It made Emily even more grateful for all that she had, and reminded her that life was to be lived and embraced, even when it frightened you.

She inhaled the sweet prairie air in deep satisfying breaths.

The summer months were some of the prettiest, when the meadows were carpeted with wildflowers, their dainty blooms like a ballet corps pirouetting and bobbing in perfect synchronicity with the breeze.

She wished she were an artist so that she could capture the scene in oils or watercolors and keep the meadows in the full flush of their summer bloom all year round. Instead, she captured it in words.

Her journal had become a deeply personal account of her triumphs and despair, and a detailed report of the prairie.

Each year, she recorded the date of the first apple blossom and the first prairie fires of the season.

She tabulated periods of rainfall, dry spells, full moons, water levels in the creek, the direction of the wind, and the temperatures Henry recorded on the thermometer he stuck in the ground.

The sky boils beneath the rising summer temperatures , she’d written.

Thunderheads keep rolling in from the east.

She liked to look back sometimes, reading over her early entries to see how far they’d come.

She still felt the excitement and optimism of those early months, but her tone was tempered now with something more grounded and practical, and with a hint of concern.

She documented the changing shape and color of the landscape as more and more acres were plowed up.

She noted that she hadn’t seen as many prairie chickens that year, nor heard the sage grouse or meadowlark, their familiar sounds replaced by the steady rumble of Henry’s machines, and those of the many other farmers who had followed his lead.

She often thought of Ike West’s ominous words during that first week when Henry had shown the men his machinery.

Was Ike right? Were they doing more harm than good?

The greatest lesson the years had taught Emily was that the prairie would not be easily tamed.

For all that she loved its wild beauty, she was still wary of the power it held over them all.

No matter how hard they worked, or how lovingly she decorated their home with cushion covers and patchwork quilts, she knew that nature had the ultimate power to destroy it all.

She lay in bed that night, the warm sticky air washing over her tired body, the light of a full moon illuminating the room.

As Henry snored softly beside her, she thought about poor Ingrid, all alone.

A lifetime of lonely nights stretching ahead of her.

Nobody beside her. Nobody to reassure her.

When Eric had been sick, Laurie had said you never felt more alone on the prairie than when someone was ill or dying.

“That’s when the loneliness presses in on you.

When you feel the miles of land between you and any help.

” Life certainly felt more fragile here, the margins between living and dying, between thriving and surviving, gossamer thin.

Emily said a silent prayer of thanks that she and Henry had been spared the anguish of anything more serious than a fever or a broken bone.

She placed a hand on his arm to make sure he was really there, not a vision, conjured from her dreams. She couldn’t imagine life without him. He was her life, her soul mate, her dearest kindest friend.

She watched him for a long while, remembering their first conversation at Annie and John’s dinner party. She was so lucky to have found him in a city as big as Chicago, or perhaps she had Annie to thank for that.

Annie.

Her thoughts turned to her sister for a moment, but she pushed them away before they took root.

Unable to sleep, she reached for her journal to write an entry for that day.

First, she turned back over the previous weeks’ pages, reading over her thoughts and, as she did, a pattern began to emerge.

Extreme tiredness. Unusual nausea. Strange reactions to familiar smells. No note of her monthlies arriving.

She sat upright, heart racing.

She’d stopped looking for signs long ago. But there they were, stark and irrefutable.

She picked up her pen and, hand shaking, wrote the date. Beneath it, she added six words that carried the weight of so many more.

I think I might be pregnant.