F rom the air, Iowa’s farmland looked like a quilt on an unmade bed. The pattern was not composed of the neat, flat squares and rectangles of Kansas, Illinois or Indiana farms. The land in Iowa rolls. Circular and oval patches are not uncommon – showing a tendency toward independence if not creativity, showing a willingness to work with nature not impose itself upon it.
The ride from the airport in Cedar Rapids to a farmhouse just outside Julia’s hometown of Iowa City was full of slow rises and gentle falls. The blacktop curved sometimes over and sometimes around the smooth swells of earth.
It was mostly quiet with Royal Bateman behind the wheel, alert for the slow-moving, horse-drawn Amish carriages. Julia huddled inside a blanket, alone in the back seat. She took reluctant comfort from the land just now beginning to show rows of green sprouts in the rich dirt. The only sounds were the wind whistling in the window gap her father always maintained to keep the air fresh, the steady drone of the engine and the occasional rattle of her wheelchair.
She had ridden in the back seat of a Ford, several of them over the years, looking at the back of the same head many times, so many times. This Ford was fairly new, but blue and large like the others. The familiar head was covered with silver not black hair and there were deep, rut-like wrinkles cross-hatched on the back of his neck.
‘Harriet’s a nurse,’ Royal said finally.
‘I know, Dad,’ Julia said, catching herself before saying ‘Daddy.’
‘Stay there a few weeks, you’ll be ready to come home with me. I can’t take care of you as well as she can. I have to work. This is the busy time.’
‘I know.’
‘Of course you know. I’m just worried you’ll think I’m deserting you or something. Harriet can be a pain sometimes.’
‘I’ll be fine. I like her. I like her place if I remember it right.’ Already her language seemed to simplify itself. Simple sentences conveying simple messages.
‘She’s happy to have you. She’s looking forward to your coming, you know,’ Royal continued.
‘Me too.’ It was still a little painful to talk. To take a breath.
‘She’ll never say it, of course.’
It seemed odd to Julia that her father, so anxious in San Francisco and even on the plane to Des Moines, now seemed so relaxed, so in charge.
There’s a smell about old houses, especially farmhouses, that suggests a memory of all the freezes and thaws, of all the wet and dry spells. Harriet’s home, perched on a hill that sloped down to a white gravel road, had that scent about it. Julia took a deep breath, drank it in. She could feel herself relax.
Funny, how sometimes smells were more powerful than sight to illuminate memories lying in wait all these years in darkness. She always knew when her father had his hair cut. There was a lotion he used, and a powder – the unpronounceable, the very foreign and in her youth, the very exotic Pinaud. The scent lingered at least for the day.
Her mother’s kitchen had a distinctive scent – apricots in the morning, especially before the afternoon when harsher, meatier smells took over. Her mother would boil dried apricots to spread on her toast. Lilac recalled her grandmother. These scents came back to her vividly.
Harriet’s farmhouse smelled of cold and emptiness. Disuse. It was a house that had less and less about it as time went on. In fact, land no longer connected Harriet’s house with its farm history. The adjacent space had been parceled off to the Amish families as Harriet needed the money. Her late husband’s medical bills pretty much wiped out the savings. It didn’t make much difference, though. Harriet had no special need to spend. With the exception of food, there wasn’t anything in the house that wasn’t at least thirty years old.
For Julia, it was painful to see the farm dwindle.
The Amish had been farming it for years. Harriet’s deed now showed little more than forty feet behind the house and the long slope that ran down to the road in front. But she had a view worth a fortune. She knew it. The picture from her living room window was rolling Iowa land at its most beautiful. Above it, there was a lot of sky.
In cities like San Francisco, it is easier to forget about the sky.
Harriet too seemed to be dwindling. She had always been smaller than her brother Royal, but she seemed to be losing her physical presence more quickly. Their coloring, too, was different. But their common origins could not be questioned. Squareness of face and the deep-set wrinkles tied them together immediately. It was clear they came from the same stock. That’s how Royal would have phrased it.
She spoke even less than her brother. Those who did not know her well thought her a sour, bitter woman. Those who knew her knew better. While she was, as the Batemans and many Iowans were, conservative with most of their resources, especially money – and had no tolerance of waste – they were generous with their time and energy. Knowing just how untelling Harriet’s face could be meant the slightest variance would reveal a lot.
It appeared to Julia that Harriet was thrilled with the idea that she nurture Julia back to health. And, like Royal, Harriet would see that this time Julia would remain on Iowa soil.
Harriet had cleared out the first floor parlor for the bedroom so that Julia wouldn’t have to maneuver the steps.
‘I aired it out for two days,’ Harriet said, ‘so it shouldn’t be too stuffy in there.’
‘Thank you Aunt Harriet.’
‘Too early for much out of the garden,’ Harriet said busying herself with unnecessary pillow fluffing. ‘But we’ll get your strength back.’
The tomatoes that came from the Ball Jar were sweet. The creamed corn was heaven. The secret was a dash of sugar, though Julia wasn’t supposed to know. She wouldn’t be able to chew the steak she saw sizzling on the broiler. Having guessed as much, Julia was served ground beef. Julia hadn’t the heart to tell her she’d sworn off red meat altogether and had given serious thought to becoming a vegetarian.
Royal and his sister ate quietly. Julia remembered it was all right not to speak. Such silences were taken as rude among most of her city friends; but here long, quiet periods were signs of comfort. Perhaps some of the quiet came about because neither Royal nor his sister would want to remind her of the ordeal. They were being respectful.
But in Iowa words like ‘plain’ and ‘quiet’ and ‘simple’ were qualities, virtues even. That Grant Wood came from Iowa was not lost on Julia. It amused her and comforted her. She had to hide her smile because of the question it would pose and from the pain it would cause her to stretch her mouth muscles any further than it took to slip in a bite of skinless stewed tomatoes.
Royal left at sundown.
It was warm enough to leave the windows open and Julia luxuriated in the soft cool breeze that passed through the screens. In the morning, she looked out of the window. She could see the laundry hanging out to dry to the side of the farmhouse across the road. Not much in the way of color. Black and white, mostly, waving in the breeze like cartoon ghosts. A large chestnut-colored horse stood ready in front of a black carriage, unattended. The sky was blue. The sun was out. White puffs of clouds moved so slowly they seemed to have been hung there, so much laundry on the clotheslines. The picture could have been from an illustrated children’s book, showing America in the 1800s.
She slipped on the blue terry cloth robe that hung on the hook behind the door, and rolled out toward the sounds in the kitchen and the smell of oatmeal.
‘You used to like it with raisins,’ Harriet said.
‘I still do.’
‘Good, because that’s the way I made it.’
The brown sugar was on the table and so was a pitcher of cream. Real cream, no doubt. Harriet had never succumbed to margarine or two percent milk or sweetener – at least not by the time Julia packed up and headed West. Apparently, Harriet remained among the unconverted.
The bread was homemade. There was just one place setting on the oak table in the kitchen. A bowl of oatmeal, pitcher of milk and a clump of pale butter on the bread plate. There was a tall glass of orange juice beside it.
‘I had mine a few hours ago,’ Harriet said.
‘What time is it?’
‘Approaching six,’ she said. ‘I thought it might be good if you slept in after the trip.’
‘Thank you for letting me sleep.’ Julia was happy the light sarcasm would go unnoticed. It was still hours earlier in California. She’d adjust.
Harriet disappeared. It was quiet. Very quiet. Julia remembered that Harriet had no radio, no television. Her only contact with the world was the Sunday edition of the Des Moines Register .
Oddly, the sweet smell of the butter as she brought toasted bread to her lips was repugnant. Was she so unused to fresh food she would have to learn to like it over again? Maybe it was sour. She smelled it again to see if she could detect it being spoiled. ‘Off’ the farmers might say. A wave of nausea spread through her body.
Later, Harriet said that Royal would be back for supper. ‘Another good thing about having you here is that I’m more inclined to see your father. He’s in need of regular cooking. If it were left up to him, he’d starve to death.’
In the afternoon, Julia wrapped a cotton blanket around herself and sat on the porch staring out at the farm across the road and the outbuildings visible to the west. Nothing seemed threatening.
No sign of street crazies yelling obscenities. No electronic madness. No noise except for the wind in the trees and the occasional slam of the wood-framed screen door. It was not likely that people in the nearby farms and towns had heard very often of AIDS or the humiliation of big city poverty or days when the air was too brown to breathe, let alone jog. Here, only the infrequent sight of an automobile stirring up the dust from the white gravel broke the fairy tale spell.
None of this dispelled the pain in her body when she moved, but it was a relief from it.
In Harriet’s hands and on Iowa soil, Julia could feel the healing begin.
It wasn’t until the third day that she realized the room she slept in was the room Harriet’s husband had died in. She recalled the last months of Everett’s death, of Everett getting thinner and thinner, moving from the rocker to the bed, a handkerchief to his mouth, withering away. Perhaps this was the official room of transition, Julia thought. Her returning, Everett’s passing.
When the family visited Everett, they would go in briefly. Say hello, be social until Harriet suggested the kids go outside. Julia and her cousins would have to recite some event of the week – what they learned in school or Sunday school.
Everett would nod. Toward the end, he would merely stare. Julia remembered it was like the light going out inside the old man. Little by little the light dimmed. Then it was gone.
‘Oh God,’ she said under her breath. Her grandmother died in this room. And her mother spent time here before she made her last trip to the hospital. A return home was not just a return to a place, but to a history. She hadn’t prepared herself for the memories. Not all of them were pleasant.
On the night of Julia’s fourth day, the dreams started. Vivid and sensual, they began with an immense sense of all is right with the world. Julia would be in a small boat floating on a quiet lake. Then the sky would darken. Finally she would not be able to see. Something would nibble at her. And inevitably she would either be dismembered or devoured.
There were variations. In all of them she was alone. She was confident that this pleasant and overwhelming sense of well being was eternal. Then, of course, something or someone – in the darkness – would begin to tear at her body.
Harriet was the kind of person who did things for people but didn’t like to be done for. Except for the dreams, Julia’s first two weeks back were nearly bliss – a complete vacation. She did nothing for herself to speak of, wasn’t allowed to help. Some days she sat on the back porch, a place used later in the season to shuck corn, snap the green beans and shell peas, preparing the harvest for canning; where onions, turnips and carrots as well as white and sweet potatoes were dusted off and busheled for the cellar.
By the third week Julia was on her feet assisted by a cane. She moved slowly and haltingly. But she moved.
Royal came for dinner every evening and complained about gaining weight from Harriet’s cooking.
‘A man’s not supposed to be a bag of bones,’ Harriet said.
‘It’ll cost me a fortune to have my buttons moved,’ he said, enjoying the audience for their small and loving squabbles.
When asked if she had any calls, Royal told Julia that a fellow named Paul had called several times and so had a ‘David,’ and that both had been told Julia would call them when she was well enough.
‘I’m well enough, Dad,’ Julia said.
‘It’s too soon to even be thinking about that place,’ Royal said. He said it with the tone that implied this was the final word on the subject. He went about eating quietly.
Julia watched how the temples above the ear pulsed as he ate.
Dinner was generally quiet, unlike it had been when her mother had been alive. Harriet, much more than her brother, lived by the motto the Batemans passed along to their children, ‘think your share and say nothing.’
By dinner’s end, Royal announced that in another week Julia would be ready to move into town.
The week that followed Julia readied herself mentally to return to the big, square white brick home on Church Street in Iowa City – the home she lived in from age eight to the day she was married. No doubt to her old room. Two years ago, when her mother died and her father tried to convince her to move back home, the idea of living in that house was the furthest thing from her mind.
Today, it wasn’t. It didn’t seem exactly right that a thirty-six-year-old woman would move back in with her father, but considering the alternative, it didn’t seem all that wrong either.
Rain fell on the Sunday Royal moved her to Iowa City. Her room was very nearly the same as it had been while she lived there. A sewing machine had been moved in and had settled in the corner that once held Julia’s record player. The Moody Blues poster had been taken down. The accents had been taken, but the sense of the room was still the same. Julia moved toward the closet. Her clothing had been removed. Hanging on the long transverse pole were items of greater value – a wedding dress and a tuxedo in a coffin of thick clear plastic. There were other pieces of clothing – a fur wrap and a long, dark fur coat.
It was late in the afternoon when she went back up, telling her father she needed to nap. As painful as it was, she investigated the boxes that were in the deep, slant-ceilinged recess of the closet. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but was obsessed with the search anyway.
Several of her dolls – none of which she’d ever played with – were in a box within a box. All in perfect condition. Some would fetch some serious dollars from those who collect such things. Stacks of birthday cards. High school yearbooks. Her diary, still locked. Key missing. She picked it with a sewing needle she found in a box by the sewing machine.
Most of the entries were short and terse, not the romantic ramblings she expected of her teen-aged self. The longest passages were about her desire to emulate Jacques Cousteau. Despite being thousands of miles from any ocean and about as landlocked as you could be, Julia remembered her fascination with deep sea diving and how her father encouraged her to do something more practical. Nursing would be nice, he suggested. Her mother had been asked to agree and she did.
There was mention of Donnie Patton ever more frequently. His eyes. His voice. The long talks. About the future. About dreams without stunting compromises with reality. Then suddenly Donnie Patton appeared no more. She had put him and the event by the Cedar River back and out of her mind. Nothing else appeared either. The remaining half of the diary was blank.
That evening, at dinner, Royal let it slip that she had received more calls. From Paul, mostly. But there were a few from David Seidman and one from a fellow with a strange name he couldn’t recall. Royal had told them Julia was not yet ready to talk, to be reminded of what happened.
‘I was here. How did I miss the calls?’
‘I had them transferred to the store – automatically. The phone company calls it something…’
‘Call forwarding.’
‘I didn’t want you thinking about it all,’ Royal said, not apologetically, nor even sympathetically. His voice had the hard, cold ring of authority. Absolute authority.
Not since leaving home had Julia ever permitted such control over her life. Now, she was quiet. Inert, really. She wondered why she hadn’t thought much about Paul and David. Especially Paul, who had been such a close and understanding friend. She would call them. Later.
‘You best let these things go,’ Royal said as if he knew what she was thinking. ‘You’re here now, where you belong.’
At first, staying in her old room was comforting. The house, which hadn’t changed, gave her a sense of security even when Royal left for work as he did invariably at six forty-five every morning of the week except Sundays.
Julia prepared dinner and more than once Royal remarked she was as good a cook as her mother. She was sure he didn’t mean it, but was pleased that she could be helpful. A few times she mentioned she ought to get a job.
Usually, he wasn’t encouraging. However the last time, over Sunday afternoon dinner at Aunt Harriet’s, it was apparent he had given it some thought.
‘In a little while, Julia,’ Royal said. ‘If you like. Maybe you could work for me. Maybe help us modernize the business a bit. Get us a computer or something. You know about those things, I imagine.’
Julia hadn’t been to the nursery since she got back. But it was another familiar place, another place to reconnect her to the past rather than the future. She could almost smell the Spruce and Hemlock, the flowering crab apple trees, the lilacs.
‘I meant something kind of temporary,’ Julia said, ‘while I try to figure out my future. I still have a business there.’ Strange how ‘there’ was a distance now measured in time as well as miles. As the familiarity of home invaded her senses, San Francisco seemed to recede. It wasn’t as real. On one hand she understood that it provided insulation from the horror. On the other, it frightened her. A strange fear. It was as if she were losing who she was.
Royal’s face went hard. He looked at Harriet. Her solemn face didn’t betray a thought or feeling.
‘Paul called last week.’ She could sense her father tensing as she spoke. ‘We’re just talking right now. He’s kept everything up. He’s very good.’
Harriet got up and put on the coffee.
‘You don’t take oak trees or maples and put them in the desert, Julia. And you don’t take palm trees and plant them in Ottumwa.’ She had heard this before. Royal believed that people, like plants, did their best in the geography of their origin. ‘That city is no place for you. I should think that would be quite obvious by now.’
The remainder of the evening was quiet. Royal didn’t finish his plate and resisted the blackberry pie. Harriet packed the pie, along with some other items from her garden, into the cardboard box Julia put into the backseat of the Ford Victoria.
‘Why don’t you come into town for dinner one night this week,’ Julia asked Harriet.
‘I’m not much for coming into the city, anymore,’ Harriet said. ‘Iowa City is a little too busy for me. I get into Kalona once a week. That’s enough for me.’
‘Cheese,’ Julia remembered. Kolona was small by any standards. The clearest memory Julia had of the Amish town was of the black horse-drawn wagons backed up to the old brick building where they made cheese. She remembered the smell of horses and milk.