Anton finished his glass, set it down. “If you-all want to hear about it, we saw a crowd of doves once so thick they blacked the sky.”
“Turtledoves?” Frankie asked.
“Passenger pigeons,” said Garland. “I remember them, too. Extinct now. That was when we were boys.”
“They sounded like a twister when a flock came o’er,” said Anton. “Our sir took us three youngens to see them. That was in eighteen-eighty.”
“Not that far back.” Garland was yawning.
“Yes it was. For Ma named it time and again. Eighteen-eighty.” Anton was animated by the memory.
“Well, if you say.”
“You and me were still wearing shirt-tails, Gar. Marc was in pants. He’d have been about ten. It was down where Maria’s folks lived.” He nodded. “At Seven Mile Run. They shot them down and left the squabs to die. They shipped them in barrels till the market was so glutted they had to feed them out to the hogs.”
“How many you reckon were in that skyful of doves, Pa?” Ellen was asking.
“Well, when they settled, the flock stretched forty miles long and ten deep. Then one day they all flew off at once. We went to look at the giant trees stripped and ruined.”
“I’d fain have seen them,” Ellen said, “darkening the sky.”
“I notice they caught some rumrunners,” Garland said, “sneaking it in from Canada in a carload of hog carcasses.” He mourned, “No more booze.”
“Prohibition’s nothing to me,” said Anton, “I make what wine I need. I’ll give you some to take back if you want. Dandelion’s the best, I’d say.”
“I’ll take you up on that. So they don’t catch me, I’ll label it perfume for the ladies.”
Frankie was tittering, Garland stretching, and the family found their beds.
Ellen remained awake. Life, it seemed, was a long quest for love. The wind was whistling low around a corner of the house. Her mind went on what Garland had said about Maria being ill. The wind sound was bringing to memory a fall evening when Ellen was a child and a whippoorwill began to call near the porch steps, first in low-pitched chucks, then shredding the night with its cry. Maria had shrieked, “Get him off the porch, girl.” Ellen ran to open the door, the song ceased as the bird winged away. But Maria had wept, “When the whippoorwill sings on your doorstep, it brings bad luck. Hit sung on the night I lost my betimes baby. It was a little boy.” Ellen had vowed then, it’ll not be so with me. Life won’t break me whatever comes. The wind was growling, hunting. She remembered that in Illinois there was a small child of hers. She had a vague wish to see what he was like. And then, nostalgia like a memory of the dead drove through her, constricting her throat, for what dwelled between Luke Dougherty and his wife.
* * * * *
On Christmas, Anton was baffled to find his brother had given him a battery radio. “Hit’s a contraption, all right.” He was tuning the stations. Static clattered in, a rasping voice and a sudden blare of music. Anton was hunching himself over the instrument on the table. “Don’t help me, Gar. Leave me run hit myself.”
The girls opened black velvet boxes. Ellen was turning a gold chain over in her hand; she laid it cold about her throat. There were matched pearls for Frankie who wore her new yellow dress and flitted between Anton and Garland. “Now, gather ye rosebuds,” Garland was quoting, “while ye may. Old Time’s still a-flying. The same flower that blooms today tomorrow’ll be dying.” He thumped the round table with his palm.
“Tell more about Chicago, Uncle. What’ll it be like for me?”
“Oh, Anton thinks you’ve got such a talent,” he was chucking Frankie’s chin, “he can’t cheat the world of it. You’ll like it, sweet. I’ll let you take it slow. Afraid I gave your sister too big a dose.” He looked at Ellen, who gravely returned his gaze. “Remember how busy I was, hon? Now that’s what I like about Christmas down here. Takes my mind off my problems.”
“Give me that old-timey religion,” the radio pealed.
“Listen at that,” Anton shouted. “No telling where those barbarians are singing from.”
The holiday week wore on. Frankie in high excitement, was easily given to laughter, as easily wept. On the second of January, it was planned, she would drive in the Reo to Chicago. The sisters were washing milk buckets in the kitchen when Ellen said, “Be good for you to part from Pa for a spell.”
“Oh, you just want him for yourself,” Frankie wailed. “He’ll ne’er romp with you like me.”
Ellen tightened her lips, threw back her head, marched to her goats in the woodshed. “Scroungy brat,” she sniffed. “That’s not so.”
They were all seated before the fire in the parlor at night. A knock came at the kitchen door and Ellen went to answer it. “Why, Lily Garrett. I don’t know when we saw you last. Want to come in?”
The fat girl was encased in a bulky coat, the figure of a youth rearing behind her. “We want you to come with us, Ellie. Frankie too. We got a wagon of hay and there’s a moon to see by. Come on, Ellie, ask if you can.”
“No. Pa wouldn’t let us. Who-all is there?” She leaned forward from the security of the house.
“A whole wagonload of us. Papa let me go. Said I’d be whipped anyway so I’d as well. It’s a deal of fun.” Lily was bouncing with energy. “This is Jacob Haas.”
“Hello,” he said.
“Reckon we can’t go, but I sure thank you for asking. And Mester Haas, too.” She nodded to the dark figure.
She came back into the parlor and Garland said, “That was your fellow, wasn’t it, sweet?” His blue eyes were admiring her.
She stepped lightly across the oak floor, containing her gestures. “Oh, it was only Lily, Uncle.”
“She’s my best friend,” Frankie said. “She told me when Sophie had those twins.”
“Yes, and those brats came five months after the girl married Buck Lemmon,” Anton said. “A loose crowd.”
“They’re young, Anton,” cried Garland.
“Rakes and loose girls. Defiling the unwedded has no excuse. I’ll keep these two chaste.”
On New Year’s Eve, Ellen was putting peas to soak in the iron kettle. Garland came looking for her. “What are you doing, puss?”
“Don’t you know it’s good luck to eat black-eye peas and sowbelly the first day of the year?”
“What really happened last spring in St. Louis, hon? It was a man, wasn’t it? I knew something was going on with you.”
She looked to her work, her fingers trembling. She felt mature, controlled. “Nothing. I ne’er reached St. Louis.”
“What I can’t figure out is how you managed to get away so quietly. I searched the stations in the morning for you. Kept it from Anton as long as I could.”
“Wish I was like you, Uncle. You got all you want.” She said it unexpectedly. “Purely I’d admire to be you.”
“Seems you could have told me your problems. You’re growing up so fast. Maybe I could have helped. Why did you run away like that?”
“I wouldn’t be Pa. But I’d be you, if I were a man.” She said it passionately, won to him by his approval of her, by his broad opinions, awed with his worldliness.
“There’s no one like you, Ellen,” he was smiling, shaking his head.
Anton called from the parlor door, “Go out and take a look at that Gladys heifer, girl.”
“I’ll go with her,” Garland shouted back. He took Ellen’s coat from the hook and held it for her. He was lighting the lantern awkwardly. He wore a fur-trimmed jacket and was pulling on kid gloves. His esteem seeped over Ellen, making her movements supple, her youth a fine thing.
The path to the barn was a river of canescent moonlight drowning the lantern glow. They walked silent until Garland said, “You know how much like my mother you are?” He reflected. “There was a way she had though, that came out sometimes. Like she really hated me.” He was speaking softer. “I’d try to make her notice the way I could work quicker and do things better than Marc. He was older. She always doted so on him.” Ellen’s quiescence encouraged him in the cover of the night. “I remember her sitting with her head up stiff in the seat of her little rig, driving her pony. Beg her to let me harness it for her, or curry it.” He murmured, “You know, you’re just the spit of her sometimes, puss. Except for your hair. Hers was more the color of Frankie’s.” He took her arm.
Ellen felt him shivering. It’s me, causing him to do that. “Venus and Mars and Jupiter are the evening stars now,” she told him. “Jupiter’s still up, he doesn’t set till about eight these days.”
In the barn, by fragile lantern light, the pregnant young cow seemed quiet. They were turning to go. Ellen noticed Sam had stuffed a burlap sack in the broken window to keep the wind out. Garland spoke again, “You know I’ve always had a thought about Marc that I never told anyone.” Ellen was listening in the near dark, amid the pungent animal odors. “He had brown straight hair and his face was different somehow. Handsome. He wasn’t like any of us.” He lit a cigarette, leisurely. “You in any hurry, sweet?” He put his arm about her and she waited to hear the secret about her dead uncle, Marc. “I don’t think he was Pa’s son at all. I think my mother married Jules Gaddy because she got caught and needed a father for her child.”
“Reckon your sir knew of it?” whispered Ellen.