Copyright © 2012 by Adam G. Fleming
All rights reserved. Published by Epic Life Studios, LLC, Goshen, Indiana.
ISBN-13: 978-1478187691
ISBN-10: 1478187697
ISBN: 9781623097820
LCCN: 2012913049
For bulk ordering information, please contact:
Adam Fleming
Epic Life Studios, LLC
1202 S. 8th St., Goshen, IN 46526
adam.fleming.lifecoach@gmail.com
FIRST EDITION, 2012
Cover design by Jordan Kauffman
Interior design by Adam Fleming
Copy editing by Dan Shenk and Danny Dean
Printed in the U.S.A. by CreateSpace
Dedication
To my father, Thomas R. Fleming.
For your years of compassionate service in long-term and hospice care,
For teaching me “Tom and I,” not “mean Tom.”
And also to my mother, Margaret Kay Fleming.
For your love of prairie grasses, wildflowers
And the creatures both timid and fierce among them.
“Let the Deed Shaw”
Amy, Emily, and Melissa
Harmony, Nebraska, 1985
Every year around the middle of October, for about a week, little trios from the sixth-grade class at Harmony Elementary could be seen in rubber chore boots, or if it was warmer than usual, in their old sneakers, stomping up and down the South Loup River. They were looking for gold.
“Hey, look!” Amy picked up something from the river bed.
“What is it?” Her friends Emily and Melissa crowded her, and Amy slipped.
“Ow!” Amy sat down in the shallow, muddy water, but she gripped the item tightly in her fist.
“Is it gold?” Melissa wondered.
“I think so. I hope so. Probably not. I’ll never be rich! Look, my jeans are all muddy,” complained Amy. She stood up again, and slowly, her fingers opened. Melissa was jumping up and down.
Emily reached out, took the thing from Amy and inspected it. Melissa kept bouncing about. “What are you so excited about, Melissa? That’s not gold; in fact, it isn’t even pyrite. This is just some stupid rock some stupid teenager spray-painted gold to fool kids like us.” Emily wound up to throw the rock back into the middle of the river where it was deep, but Amy grabbed her arm and pulled the rock from her fingers.
“Just because it isn’t gold doesn’t mean I can’t take it home as a souvenir, or we could use it for Exhibit A in our project, right? Besides, this little rock is so cute …” But the others cut her off with a look. Clearly, they weren’t interested in cuteness when it came to pebbles. With that, Amy shoved the worthless, spray-painted stone in her pocket.
“We’re going to have the best project because we’re going to find some real gold—” Emily declared, then paused. “What are you jumping around for, Melissa?”
“Because I’m cold,” Melissa said. (Emily knew that, for a moment there, Melissa thought Amy had found something … but didn’t want to admit it.) “It’s nearly dark. It was nice out here right after school, but it’s getting chilly. Besides, nobody ever finds gold out here. The gold was all found a hundred years ago. It’s 1985, duh. You won’t find gold, Emily; nobody ever does.”
“There was gold here once,” replied Emily, “so there’s got to be at least a little tiny bit more, and I’m going to find it. And anyway, if there never was any gold here, I’m going to prove it.”
“We’re going to be rich!” Amy shouted, throwing her arms skyward.
“I don’t care about being rich, I want to be warm,” said Melissa.
“I don’t care about being rich either,” Emily agreed, “but I’m going to stay down here until I find some gold.”
“But there’s no gold left,” Melissa said, “The miners found it all.”
“They can’t have found it all,” Emily insisted.
“They did too,” Amy said. “People in my family found it, it was my great-great, um, maybe great, great, great, no, wait, um. My ancestors found it. I know it.”
“Then how’s come you aren’t rich?” Melissa said.
Amy started to cry. Melissa looked surprised, then said she was sorry.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” Amy said.
Emily wasn’t so sure anyone in Amy’s family had ever found gold here. For one thing, they were a bunch of liars. She wasn’t going to say this to Amy. Amy’s mom made promises all the time and didn’t keep them, Amy’s brother AJ wasn’t considered reliable at school, and her dad … Emily felt both disdain and pity for Amy. She wrapped her arm around the girl’s shoulder.
“Come on,” Emily said, “let’s go home. You can both take a hot shower at my house before Melissa’s mom comes to pick you guys up. You can borrow my pink sweater …” Amy stopped crying and began to chatter about clothes. As they climbed up the riverbank, headed back into town, Emily shot a glance back at the water. Tomorrow was Saturday. She’d be back. And she’d find that dang gold if it took her all weekend.
People called it the Annual Sixth-Grade Gold Rush, because the students did a unit in their History class with Mrs. Albright on local history, and each group had to write a paper about whether or not there had been an authentic gold strike sometime in the 1870s.
In spite of the lack of any geological evidence that there could have been gold in the flatlands, somewhere hidden in the rock between the topsoil and the Ogallala Aquifer beneath, churned up by the gradual shaping and reshaping of the slow-moving, and often nearly empty, South Loup, the students—indeed, the entire town—believed that gold was once found there in the river outside Harmony. Once in a while you’d see an older person hiking along the banks of the river, stooping to pan occasionally without much hope. It was considered a legitimate “hobby.” Men with metal detectors had been known to make decent money finding chunks of steel, bits of copper pipe and hundreds of aluminum cans, then scrapping the stuff out for cash. There was a lot of valuable metal in the South Loup, but gold was elusive. Usually a week of searching in sixth grade was enough to convince the Harmony kids that whatever piles of gold might have been there a hundred years ago were gone now. But it didn’t stop some people from the irrational vision of finding piles of gold coins—like the crew of the Hispaniola does at the end of Treasure Island.
In her classroom, Mrs. Albright had a way of bringing history alive. Her white hair in a bun, her carefully pressed slacks swishing, she briskly stepped from her desk to the blackboard where she pulled down a map of Nebraska. Children immediately recognized the shape of their state. It was a butcher knife, chopping down on Kansas, the way the Cornhuskers do when they play football against the Jayhawks or the Wildcats.
“The South Loup originates outside Stapleton,” said the teacher, warming to her subject. “Our small communities dot the banks of this river: the villages of Arnold and Callaway in Custer County, Harmony (we are right here), Pleasanton, and Ravenna in Buffalo County. The South Loup joins the Middle Loup—that’s called a confluence—just outside Boelus, and only a few more miles downstream the North Loup joins in. The three Loups, like a wolf pack, flow as one, running silent in the night, keeping low, from where they join together just outside the tiny town of Cushing until the waters join the Platte near the much larger town of Columbus. The Platte meets the Missouri at the Iowa line east of Omaha, which flows on to join the Mississippi at St. Louis and then on down to New Orleans and into the Gulf of Mexico.
“Like the biblical genealogy about a baby born in some backwater of the Roman Empire, this series of rivers is more significant than it seems on the surface. Why?”
“Because there weren’t any roads back then?” a girl named Erica said.
“Very good. If you were a French trader in 1862 who wanted to take a canoe up the river from New Orleans to what we now call Colorado by way of the Platte to look for beaver pelts and gold, why might you make a wrong turn at the Loup?”
Emily’s next-door neighbor Ben raised his hand. “Because the rains had made the confluence of the Platte and Loup into a swamp about two miles wide.”
“That’s correct. So if you come out of the swamp and you’re on the Loup, and you kept staying to your left, or south, every time you came to a branch because that’s the way to Colorado—or it would be, if you were on the Platte—you’d eventually be only twenty miles north of the Platte, and your primitive navigational system of sextant and compass might seem slightly off. It’s telling you you’re roughly on the Platte near where Fort Kearney is supposed to be, but you can’t find the fort, because instead of being on the Platte, you’re really now on the South Loup. Does anybody know what that is called?”
Emily spoke up: “It’s called being really lost.” The class found this amusing.
“Yes, exactly, Emily, you’d be completely lost. And if you were very stubborn, you wouldn’t admit that you had gone astray, and you’d insist that your location was the Fort Kearney. All this happened to Louis St. Martin, who made this journey and this mistake in the winter of 1862, saw that winter was coming and didn’t want to admit he was lost, so he built a fort and spent the winter alone.”
Louis St. Martin didn’t spend his winter entirely alone, but Mrs. Albright, for all her other strengths as a teacher, didn’t relish explaining certain aspects of history, especially the details that are sketchy. According to St. Martin’s rather blunt journal, one can infer that St. Martin was out fruitlessly checking his traps for beaver one day, and he came across a woman and a small child huddled together, waiting to die of starvation or by freezing, whichever came first. The woman was a Santee Sioux. Her tribe was not from the area. Her husband had been convicted of murder and was one of the thirty-eight men executed in Mankato, Minnesota, following the Sioux War of 1862, and her brothers had been sent to a prison in Iowa. She had simply wandered. It had been days since she’d had the strength to snare even a rabbit. But Louis St. Martin had shot a buffalo, and he had plenty of meat; he attempted to nourish the mother and child with some buffalo jerky. He took them to his fort where the woman gradually recovered and began to see him as a kindhearted man who could help her stay warm at night. After she conveyed her openness to such a possibility, her rescuer wasted little time responding in kind. The child, sadly, did not recover. St. Martin’s journal referred to the child only as l’enfant, which means “the child” but never as il or elle, “he” or “she.” “L’enfant” was too far gone from starvation or perhaps scurvy. L’enfant died the day after Louis found them.
Nowhere in the history books is it written down, but one can surmise that this Sioux woman, whose name was Ptaysan-Wee, found her love for the rather hairy Frenchman bittersweet, comforting only in the way a good bearskin rug is comforting, sweet to the skin but not as much to the soul as one might hope. In the middle of the night, some hours after their lovemaking, she awoke from nightmares that would not go away. Her eyes staring into opaque darkness, she could still see her husband, her handsome first love, swinging by the neck from a rope, according to the mandate of a man named Abraham Lincoln. In front of her face, in the depths of the night, the ghost of her dead husband appeared, a man who fought to defend his land and protect his child.
“I failed you,” he said.
She loved him for trying.
The woman soon had another child. The daddy was quite pleased—and named the new boy Louis, after himself.
It’s not hard to imagine why Mrs. Albright skimmed this part of the lesson. First of all, there was the interracial, childbirth-out-of-wedlock issue, not a topic she wished to explore too deeply with sixth-graders. Second, there was the fact that the town matriarch’s first husband was given the death sentence by an American icon and one of the town’s three most popular presidents, right after George Washington and Ronald Reagan. And third, the kids in her classes were more interested in the gold-strike part of the story anyway. Regardless of Mrs. Albright’s personal thoughts on capital punishment and extramarital sex, she knew what was best for her if she wanted to keep her job.
Owen
Harmony, 1985
Some days, Owen Thibodeaux remembered the earliest things quite clearly. Other days, he struggled to remember whether or not he’d had lunch. Today was a good day.
Coastal Maine, 1898
His grandfather shoved off from shore, little Owen clinging to the sides of the rowboat with both hands. Immediately the earth disappeared, the boat swallowed in the mist like a great fish takes a hook into its belly. No nibbling. Grandfather sat down, set the oars in their locks, and began to row out into the void, which was the little bay called Bailey’s Mistake. Grandfather knew where all the rocks were with his eyes closed; he called them petits rochers. Even so, Owen worried they would hit something. He turned and faced the bow and peered into the fog, searching for the horizon, aching for the dawn to break into day.
But little Owen, a budding scientist, had many questions for his grandfather. “Except when it’s foggy, I can see right through the air; it doesn’t have any color. So why is the sky blue?”
“Well …”
“But, Grandpapa, when you pour water in a cup, it’s clear. Why is the sea green?”
“Well …”
“Grandpapa, are all lobsters red?”
“Most of them are. Once I caught a blue one. And I knew an old man who caught a gold one, once.”
“Was it really made of gold, or did it just have a gold skin? Do they taste the same as the red ones?”
“I imagine they would. But you don’t eat them. They bring good luck if you throw them back.”
“I want to catch a gold one, Grandfather,” Owen said then, scarcely missing a beat, “Why are you going backwards?”
His grandfather laughed. “How can you tell we’re going backwards in this fog? Perhaps we’re really going forwards.”
Owen watched as Grandfather pulled up the first few traps, empty. In the last trap, he pulled up a fourteen-pound lobster. Owen was disappointed to see he was a regular old red. Grandfather dumped the disoriented creature from the cage into four inches of bilge water at the bottom of the boat, and the lobster scuttled into the dark under Grandfather’s bench.
“Grandfather, he goes backwards too!”
This time Grandfather was serious. “My boy,” he said, “the lobster goes backwards to keep his enemy in sight. Always in front of you is your past. The dangers you can see and know, but the things that hurt you, those are all behind you. That’s why most people find their way into the future headed backwards. They’re keeping an eye on the dangers they’ve faced before, because even if they could see the dangers the future holds coming, they wouldn’t recognize them as dangers—until it’s too late.”
The crustacean was so deep under grandfather’s bench he was now tucked in a bucket that had been left on its side. It was the pail they hauled their catch home in at the end of the day. Nothing could sneak up behind him, surprise or ambush him. Feeling much safer with his tail against a wall and his pincers in front of his face, the lobster peered out from his newfound cave and waited.
Harmony, 1985
Owen sat in his wheelchair in a thickening visual fog brought on by cataracts, feeling as confused as a trapped lobster might. He wasn’t in Maine. I’m in Harmony. Where is Harmony? Mentally, he was never idle. Owen was dropping traps down into the darker spaces of his memory, hoping to pull up a catch. But on days like today, his work was futile. Did I ever catch a golden lobster? He decided he’d like to have a snack. Perhaps at the kitchen they’d give him something to munch on. Sometimes they have graham crackers.
A woman was talking. Her voice was vaguely familiar. She sounded like someone he’d once known … who? He thought she’d said her name was Jean, but he never knew a Jean. Whom did he know? He knew … someone named Edith … she was talking. He tried to focus on what she was saying. “… and so, I brought you this stone. I found it on the beach in Nova Scotia. It was sitting on top of a much larger boulder, all alone, as if someone had come and put it there just for me—just for you.” Jean took his hand in hers and slipped the stone into his palm. It was about the size of an egg, but flatter.
Owen was quiet for a long time. He rubbed the little rock with his thumb, and it was pleasantly smooth to the touch, worn down over millennia by waves and sand. Finally he said, in a strangely rich baritone for one so old, “You said your name was Jean, Miss?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Ah.” He thought for some time again. “This stone you brought me: Am I correct in understanding that it comes from the beaches of Nova Scotia?”
“Yes.”
Owen rubbed it repeatedly with his thumb. “It’s very smooth,” he said several times before lapsing into a deep silence. She shared his silence for a minute or two as he pondered whom he’d known with a voice like hers, as he considered the smoothness of the stone.
He spoke again: “Does it have a spectacular color?”
“It’s gray.”
“Ah. Then it’s the same color as everything I see, so it’s all for the best. If it were a lovely red granite, or green serpentine, it would do me no good. I’m nearly blind, you know.” He rubbed his chin. “I’m sorry I didn’t shave before you came. My chin isn’t smooth like this rock, or perhaps you’d kiss me.”
Jean laughed. “You are more than presentable,” she told him, then cupped his rough chin in her hand and kissed his cheek as though he were a little boy.
“Thank you,” he said formally, lapsing again into silence.
Jean sat down. She glanced out the window momentarily, her eyes soon returning to the old man. Although his body was broken down, which she expected, and his mind was not altogether sharp as it once had been, about which she had been warned, his voice was rich and powerful. She felt that instead of a scientist, he could have been in radio or perhaps television—if he had been handsome. It was hard to tell now. His ears were comically large, and the skin of his face a floppy clock that, sagging, told time in decades. As a professor, his lectures must have been captivating: his passion for all sorts of mineral deposits, his flair for the drama of the upheaval of layers in the earliest days of the formation of earth as we know it. Each time he opened his mouth, that voice came as a shock, as though the past itself were speaking. The sound of that voice was disconcerting. In contrast, the silence had been the easier part of her visit.
Jean had been looking around the room for a while, and when she looked at Owen again, she saw that his chin was on his chest. She pondered him for a long moment and then, not knowing what else to do, she stood to leave.
He heard her stand up; the chair creaked, and his peripheral vision was just good enough to tell him that she was blocking the light.
“It pleases me more …” he mumbled. She wondered if he’d been asleep.
“What?” she said.
“Jean.” He looked up suddenly. He hadn’t been asleep, after all. At least he wasn’t now.
“Yes, that’s me.” She took a step forward.
“Jean … brought me this rock from Nova Scotia. It pleases me more than the Rock of Gibraltar,” he added, with conviction in his voice. Then his head drooped again in fatigue, and his chin rested on his chest.
“It was good to meet you, Mr. Thibodeaux.” She nearly whispered it.
“Who’s there?” Owen said with a start. He felt he’d had a beautiful dream, but he couldn’t remember what it was. This smooth stone in his hand, now that was real. Empirical evidence. Perhaps it was a dream, but it was real too.
Melissa and Randall
Harmony, June 1992
Early in the afternoon on the day they graduated, Melissa jumped into Randall’s pickup for a short ride over to the home of his grandmother, whom he called “Nana” with a great deal of affection. It amused Randall that Melissa assumed that Nana had invited them. In fact, Randall had called Nana and told her he had a surprise. He drove almost too fast, as was typical. Melissa rolled down the window and let the breeze whip her hair back and forth, the slapping strands of hair nearly stinging her face. When they arrived she was as disheveled as could be. She pulled a scrunchie out of her pocket and pulled her hair back in a simple ponytail, and Randall knew she considered herself as presentable as she needed to be; she grinned at him, and he smiled back.
Randall’s fingers felt thick as he fumbled at the laces and removed his boots on the screened-in porch before rapping at the door. Melissa had been peppering him with questions about Nana, and as usual, he hadn’t gotten a word in edgewise. Knowing Melissa, she’d chatter all the way through tea with Nana, who was bound to fall in love with her. “One more thing, Melissa. I planned to tell you before—” he began, but just then Nana opened the door. “Hello, Nana.” He stooped, allowing her to kiss his cheek.
“My darling boy,” she cooed. “And who is this lovely young lady?”
Nana knew who the young lady was, of course, but she wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to force Randall to give her a formal introduction.
“Nana, this is my, er, friend, Melissa Stoltzfus.” Randall felt himself blushing. “Melissa, this is Nana Martin.” He gave a little bow awkwardly in the doorway. Even though Nana made him practice these British formalities at her house, he had never used them anywhere else. One day when he was nine, he told her, “But, Nana, we live in Nebraska, not England,” and she gave him a look that plainly told him that where they actually lived made no difference to her; he was expected to behave like a gentleman from London, Ontario, her place of birth.
“Let me see you, Melissa Stoltzfus,” Nana said, pausing a moment to hold her by the forearms and look her in the eyes for a long moment. Nana touched her own lips lightly, and then her fingers flitted over Melissa’s forehead in a quiet blessing. Finally she spoke. “If Randall has brought you, you are welcome in this house. It’s so good to have you here.”
Randall noticed gratefully that she didn’t ask Melissa who her parents were. That was the sort of thing Melissa’s parents might have done; indeed, they had done so the first time he met them. When he’d said his parents were Gerald and Margie Martin, they’d been puzzled. “We knew some … Martins in Hesston, Kansas,” they had said tentatively. Melissa was a Mennonite. If a connection could be found, even if it was “We’re third cousins, once removed, on your father’s side” or “Oh, your grandparents were on the mission field in India with So-and-So in 1937” or “Yes, I knew your mother’s cousin’s wife’s roommate in college,” everyone’s place in the community could then be established by inference.
Once he realized why they were asking if he was related to these Martins in some important-sounding place called Hesston, Randall explained that his family’s name, centuries ago, had been Saint Martin, that the background was French, not German. Melissa’s parents’ eyes had lit with both understanding and disappointment at the same time. A Catholic boy. But, as Randall hastily explained, since Nana came from the Anglican tradition, and Grandpa Louis (God rest his soul) had been Catholic with a healthy dose of Sioux religious influences piled on when it wasn’t any particularly important saint’s day, Randall and his brother had been raised Methodist. This had confused Melissa’s parents even more, so he dropped it.
Melissa preferred to be judged on her own merits; she found Nana’s greeting without inquiry into her ancestry refreshing, particularly since she’d never met any woman over the age of fifty who had not asked such questions. She shot Randall a quizzically pleased smile as Nana led them into the parlor, as if to say, “You have a cool grandma!”
Randall sipped his tea slowly. He didn’t mind listening; Melissa was here precisely so that she and Nana could talk. His agenda could wait. He sat back and inhaled slowly through his nose. The house smelled a particular way—not unpleasantly, but in that way a widow’s house can smell that makes you feel like you’d better not bump into anything and hope the brownies will be served before you leave.
“These teacups …” began Melissa, who always loved having tea parties with her friend Emily when she was a girl. She turned to Randall in astonishment. “These teacups are amazing!”
“They’re Aynsley teacups, in the corset style. Nana brought them with her from Canada when she married my grandfather. They’re my favorite teacups,” Randall told her.
“You like teacups?” Although Melissa had been dating Randall for two years now, she didn’t know this about him. It wasn’t exactly something he broadcast at high school.
“Certainly,” he said. “Nana has always made sure that each of her grandchildren knows how to behave at a proper tea. This cup here”—he cradled the item in his thick, calloused hand like a baby bird—“I’ve been drinking out of it since I was old enough to hold it.”
“That’s right, darling,” Nana told her. “Ever since Randall’s grandfather Louis brought me home (God rest his aching soul) they’ve all accused me of trying to civilize the plains.”
“‘Anglicizing the plains’ is what he used to say,” Randall corrected.
“What’s the difference? Well. My husband’s great-grandfather founded Harmony …” She looked back at Melissa. “Did you know that? Sometimes I wonder if it was worth it. There are times when my husband’s people have—how can I put this?—too much vision for their own good. They can get a little crazed in the head—well, not Randall, but some of them. Why, Louis’s great-grandfather, whose name was also Louis—but you know they all called him ‘Papa’—he was the one, with his brother Philippe, who built a stockade and founded the little fort. He called it Fort Kearney and persuaded people that his was the original Fort Kearney, that the other one was a hoax.
“You know, in 1862 some folks made a wrong turn and came up the Loup here instead of the Platte, thinking they were headed for the gold mines in what’s now Colorado, but, of course, it was the wrong trail.” She tsked and gestured toward the West dismissively, as if anyone headed that direction was insane.
“What happened?” asked Melissa, curious to hear Nana’s version of local history.
“They got caught in the snow and wintered at the fort; Papa insisted he was on the Platte,” continued Nana, dropping her voice to just above a whisper. “They started … making babies. So, before you knew it, there was a town—and to everyone who lived here, it was the original Fort Kearney— Don’t fidget so, Randall,” she interrupted herself.
“I’m not fidgeting, Nana.” Randall had heard the story of his ancestor’s deceptive founding of Harmony too many times. His ancestor was Nebraska’s version of Leif Eriksson. Besides, he did have a particular reason for bringing Melissa to meet Nana, and the more he sat, the more he waited, the more nervous he felt.
“It wasn’t much of a town, though,” continued Nana, undeterred, “until they found the gold in the South Loup in the spring of 1872. Back in 1867 we had to have a different name, when Nebraska became a state, and there was a nasty brawl about whose Fort Kearney was the real one too. The local boys were on the verge of a shootout with the fellows from Fort Kearney, until he backed down at his wife’s insistence, and he named the town Old Kearney—for the surveyor. Now, his wife, Ptaysan-Wee, which meant ‘White Buffalo Calf Woman’ … she was a Sioux Indian. Her people were from north and west of here. He must have met her on the way back from trapping beaver up in Wyoming or something, and he brought her along; then she converted to Catholicism and took the name Mary St. Martin.” And now Nana’s voice dropped to a whisper. “She renamed the town Harmony—though she spelled it with that funny ie ending—because of her hopes for peace between Indians and Catholics. She did it that very day in 1876 she heard the news of Little Big Horn. It is said that each day she smoked a pipe and prayed for the birth of the White Buffalo, which indicated the beginning of an age of world peace and spiritual harmony. Even after she converted to Catholicism!” Nana rolled her eyes heavenward, then resumed her story.
“But Ptaysan-Wee—well, she was a visionary. She’s the one who started the utopian commune that lasted from 1902 to 1917, when she died wandering in a blizzard outside of town. Well. When I brought my teacups with me from Ontario, young lady, the place did need some civilizing—starting with spelling Harmony correctly.” Melissa nodded politely. Randall had warned her that Nana could have some peculiar and very particular ideas about the way things ought to be. It was best not to challenge her. She meant well.
“Well, Nana,” Randall blurted, placing his cup with a too-loud clink on his saucer and returning it to the tray, “Melissa here is my teacup girl. I brought her to claim her cup.” Nana gave a small squeal and clapped her hands in girlish delight.
Melissa, a question on her face, turned toward Randall, who swallowed hard as he gazed into her lovely eyes. He could spend all day with those eyes. “Your teacup girl? What are you talking about?” Melissa placed her hand inquisitively on Randall’s arm.
“You’d better tell her, dear, while I fetch the cup,” Nana said, easing herself out of her chair and moving with a slight limp off to the kitchen.
“Nana has a large Aynsley collection, you see,” began Randall. “Some cups are more special than others. The one you’re drinking out of is no big deal. But she has some special ones she never gets out. They’re gifts, for whoever the grandkids choose to marry.” He paused a moment, a little smile on his face. “I hope you’ll accept one of those?”
“You mean …?”
“It’s like an engagement ring you can drink tea out of—” Randall began, but before he could finish, Melissa was throwing her arms around his neck and kissing him softly, the kisses of a woman who would gladly be a wife. Even though they’d kissed many times before, this time was different. He suddenly became aware of that flippy feeling in his stomach.
Nana made a small coughing sound from the door. “You’ll accept the teacup then, I presume, luv?”
It was beautiful—a creamy white with tiny flowers of cherry red—and there was a saucer to match. Melissa still couldn’t believe it. “You mean I get to keep this?”
“It’s the family’s teacup, and now it’s yours. Of course I hope that as long as I live you’ll let me watch over it, and you’ll come down for tea now and then.”
“That would be wonderful. You know, I don’t have a nana,” Melissa told her.
“I know, dear. Randall has told me all about you.” Nana smiled down at him, and he blushed.
“All about me?” Melissa looked at Randall again. “I can’t imagine you telling anyone all about anything! The closest you’ve gotten to telling me all about something is the Farmall you were restoring for your senior shop class.”
Randall smiled. “Nothing else much worth talking to Nana about,” he said, “besides tractors, teacups, and you. Um, Melissa, since you can’t take the teacup home, I thought you might want to wear this.” And he produced a ring with a very tiny diamond on it. “I hope it’s big enough,” he said. She slipped it on her finger.
“Yes, it fits perfectly.” Melissa’s smile was radiant; she threw her arms around him again.
“I meant the diamond,” Randall admitted.
“Oh, that? Of course! It’s beautiful. Oh Randall!” For once, Melissa was speechless. So she kissed him again. Nana suddenly found things to do in the kitchen.
Owen
The night he met his wife didn’t seem so long ago to Owen.
Omaha, Nebraska, December 31, 1927
It was New Year’s Eve, and Owen had been in Omaha only since August. Nebraska had been good to him so far. His colleagues at the university had been welcoming, and he found their discourses on all manner of subjects—not just geology—entirely fascinating. Owen loved a good conversation. He could remember everything about that evening except her name.
She was standing in front of the gas fireplace in a green dress, holding a glass of pink champagne nervously, when Owen saw her. His first thought was that the dress was remarkable: it resembled a malachite brooch from Egypt he had given his mother.
“Who’s the girl over there in that amazing dress?” The first three acquaintances he asked shrugged. He grew more intrigued by her mystery.
Owen found the hostess, a socialite named Mrs. Hendrickson. “Excuse me, Ma’am. That girl by the fireplace—yes—do you know her?”
“Allow me to introduce you,” Mrs. Hendrickson said with a smile. As she led him by the elbow toward the woman he’d indicated, weaving their way around a variety of other guests, the hostess briefed him on the woman he was about to meet. “She’s an elocutionist, wouldn’t you know. She teaches private diction lessons to students who are interested in film and radio careers; she works with those unfortunate souls who have impediments.” And now she leaned closer to his ear, confidentially. “The girl has amazing diction, but I’ve noticed that when she meets an attractive young man such as yourself, she tends to fall apart and mash her words together. Do promise me you’ll be kind.” Owen nodded, and a moment later the nosy socialite chirped, “Darling, allow me to introduce you to Owen Thibodeaux, the newest professor of geology at the university.”
“Yes, well, just an associate professorship,” he said, laughing. The girl in the malachite dress was indeed a little nervous; that he could see. She finished her glass of champagne almost too quickly, her face glowing like a rose quartz. She looked as though the fire was warming her a bit too much, and the champagne was making her feel dizzy. She seemed a bit frail. Not altogether plain or pallid, but certainly not altogether vibrant, sensuous or healthy either. Still, her gown, which he somehow knew was borrowed, made her gray eyes green, and she had a mysterious quality about her that aroused his curiosity.
After a bit of small talk, Owen blurted, “I must admit, your dress is stunning, Miss—oh my, I’ve forgotten your name already. I don’t mean to offend, but I’m terrible with names. I suppose I’m one of those stereotypically absentminded professors.”
She gave him her name again, and he more or less repeated himself: “The dress is magnificent!”
Blushing, she told him, “Thank you. I very much appreciate your compliments, sir,” and in spite of what Mrs. Hendrickson said about her diction when talking to handsome bachelors, she enunciated perfectly. She accepted another glass from a passing waiter, and Owen could see that she did so against her better judgment. Owen watched as her tongue darted perfectly between her teeth when she said “thank” and her lips formed a perfectly round O when she said “you,” and perhaps because of the liquor he was consuming, he began to think further about her mouth in other ways. In spite of the drinks, or perhaps because of them, she seemed so controlled when her mouth moved. They both had another round of champagne at midnight, and he walked her home through the snow where she asked him in and he accepted. In the back of their minds, they would later admit, they were both astonished at themselves.
In the morning, Owen was wondering what on earth he would say, when he finally found her in the kitchen.
“Look,” he fumbled, “I was wondering … come on, now, please don’t cry so …” He paused as her weeping intensified. He was a scientist, and he vaguely understood that emotions were not his forte. It would be more accurate to say that his main and conscious thought at the moment was that he hated crying, couldn’t tolerate it one more moment, and had to stop it somehow. Where was the switch? Things were getting uncomfortable. “I was wondering if you could wear that same green dress for our wedding,” he blurted, “perhaps on Saint Valentine’s Day?”
“Professor,” she groaned, “I should throw you out, you rogue. But look, I’ve even made you coffee, and toast with marmalade. Don’t be cruel. Are you mocking me?” She turned to face him, the streaks from her tears making her look ghostly to him.
Owen looked her in the eye and said, “How old are you?”
She bawled harder and couldn’t answer.
“Well, as for me, I’m thirty-one, and I’ve never done that in my life—I swear on my mother’s grave.” He pressed, “How old are you, dammit?”
“Don’t swear,” she protested. “I’m thirty-three.”
“Well, then. Have you had any other offers lately?” he challenged her.
She looked sullen for a moment. “No.” Then she turned bitter. “You are mocking me!”
“I’m not!” He felt indignant for a moment, but then rationalized that this was really his fault. “I’ve made a mess of it, I’m afraid.” And as Owen got down on one knee, he continued, “Don’t look so astonished, my dear. I’ve had no offers lately either, I must admit. See here. I’ll ask your father properly as soon as you can introduce me to him, and I’ll buy a diamond ring this very morning. Won’t you let me make an honest girl out of you?”
He might be a rogue—but in a handsome sort of way. He was funny, and his diction! Nonpareil! That could be why I invited him in, she mused. She’d never get an offer from a man with such an important job as associate professor of Geology again, that was for certain. “Oh, all right then,” she sighed and dried her tears.
“You’ll wear the malachite dress?”
“The what?”
“The green party dress. It’s so lovely.”
“Yes, I’ll wear it. I certainly can’t wear white.” And she began to sob again. Owen groaned inside. This girl is intolerable unless she’s drunk! he thought. Dammit. What in blazes is her name anyway?
She cried all through the wedding and during most of the honeymoon except when he was able to get her to have a few drinks. He couldn’t stand her sober, even when she wasn’t crying, which seemed like an extremely rare thing to him. For the first few months she cried over her previous wantonness, then for the next few years she was mostly drunk. A few years after that, she sobered up for a last chance to try to get pregnant, only to cry desperately over her ultimate barrenness, and then for a while she was mostly drunk again. He found her cooking bland and lacking in imagination—and her company increasingly lackluster in the way he imagined the company of the woman from Grant Wood’s new painting American Gothic must be. Lovemaking was a chore akin to wrestling a feisty but undersized trout into a net—awkward and unrewarding—and Owen gradually stopped fishing for it. As his career progressed, he discovered more reasons to travel: lecturing, directing digs. Those were his best moments, the farther flung the better. He became important, published several ground-breaking works, and was consulted by geologists worldwide.
There was one more bout of weeping sobriety when he returned from the Black Hills one summer after a few months of geological exploration with a team of undergraduates, but that was pretty much the whole of it as far as sobriety went, and they lapsed finally into an interminable marriage of inconvenience. Although divorce was discussed several times, they never followed through, because, as she said, “We’ve already begun this marriage on an improper note. Two wrongs don’t make a right.” He hadn’t the heart to disagree with her. In fact, when he thought seriously about getting a divorce, he realized that for her, it would likely end in either being sent to an institution for the mentally ill or suicide. Already possessed with a deeply repressed sense of guilt, he didn’t want to feel responsible for that as well. Besides, a divorce and the subsequent hassles would have been a distraction from his work.
Owen’s succinct perspective on the entire situation came out in a candid moment with his good friend and former roommate from Harvard, Professor Stephens of Northwestern University. One day, after Owen had been married for ten years or so, Stephens asked, “How’s ol’ What’s-her-name these days anyhow, Thibodeaux?”
“She’s an all right girl, I suppose, but over the years I’ve found that although she can enunciate well enough, she never has found much of anything interesting to actually say.”
Most of the time, Owen could still remember this.
Rarely did he want to talk about it.
The part Owen didn’t remember anymore was how Stephens had changed the subject of their conversation to something that interested them both much more than Owen’s wife.
“You know, Thibodeaux, I had to drive through Nebraska, of course, on my way to a conference in Boulder last fall.”
“I’m sorry,” said Owen.
“Oh, it’s quite all right. I stopped at a lunch counter in Kearney. You know the place? I got to talkin’ to a local boy, a farmer in his early twenties who said his name was Doc. He was telling everyone in sight how much gold they pulled out of the South Loup River, ‘piles and piles, back in the 1880s,’ up near a place called Harmony. Do you know of it?”
“Near Kearney, you say?”
“Yes. I should warn you, the other locals, the Kearney boys, were all scoffing, and he nearly came to fisticuffs with a few of them. Said his own ancestors found it, and he ought to know.”
“It’s not possible,” Owen exclaimed.
“Hypothetically …” Stephens broke off.
“I know my own state,” Owen said.
“The Black Hills are a geological anomaly. What if you have a smaller anomaly in your own backyard?”
“I wouldn’t be a scientist if I didn’t investigate,” Owen said. “Do you think I could get a grant?”
Stephens shrugged. “If you find anything, or even if you don’t, I’d like to hear what you turn up.”
With one project after another on top of his normal class load, Owen forgot about Harmony for ten years, until Stephens reminded him of it in the postscript of a routine correspondence between the two men sometime in the mid-forties. This time, Owen scheduled a weekend to drive out to Harmony, at least to turn over a few rocks in the riverbed and maybe interview a few old-timers.
Amy
Harmony, June 1992
Seventeen students marched into Harmony High’s gymnasium. Today would be the last time anyone would use it. The school system in Harmony was consolidating with several other small towns, and bulldozers were scheduled to wipe the buildings from the face of the earth the following morning.
Amy Martin glanced around. She saw her mother in the bleachers, smiling like a baboon, waving at her, trying to take a picture of her. Amy marched slowly next to Randall. He had grease under his fingernails and a smudge by his ear. Under his graduation robe he wore a collared shirt and tie. His face was red. She doubted he could breathe; his neck was probably a twenty-one and his shirt a nineteen and a half. Good old Randall.
At the very end of the line, the odd seventeenth graduate with nobody to march beside her was Emily Zimmerman, class valedictorian and the perpetual victim of alphabetical order.
The graduates reached their seats and sat down with a sigh as if the march down the aisle had taken four years. Amy’s boyfriend, Brad, was trying to catch her eye, but she pretended to be interested in whatever was happening on stage.
Emily got up from her seat on the stage to give her valedictory speech. Amy sat watching her and felt a surge of nostalgia that gave her goose bumps. Emily was never her best friend; in fact, she always felt that Emily looked down on her. But the tea parties they used to have with Melissa … all those good times came back now, and the catfights were forgotten.
Amy tried to focus on what Emily was saying.
“For the last three years I sat back there with the band and played Pomp and Circumstance. I thought about what I would do when it was finally our turn. Not just the speech, but what I would do with my life. The graduates’ speeches were always pretty much the same. I don’t know if any of you took notes. Call me a nerd if you want; I did. Our first year, the speech was titled ‘Where Will We Go Next? We Can, if We Try!’ When we were sophomores, the speech was ‘Good Old Harmony, I’ll Be Back.’ Last year our quarterback gave a speech. Remember that? It was titled ‘I’m a White Buffalo Forever.’ But most of the kids who graduated, even just last year, aren’t around anymore.
“I don’t know about you, but I can’t stand the thought of more sentimental bunk spoken by someone who is leaving town, never to return. The school is closing, and there’s a reason for that. This town is dying. Well, everyone thinks I should go off to college and become a doctor or lawyer. Maybe I will. But I’m not ready to leave yet, so I’m not going to say, ‘I’ll be back.’ We all know there was gold in that river. At least, around here we just believe it, blindly; we accept it to be true. I do too, but have you looked at the facts? No trace of gold for nearly a century, not a single nugget showing up in the river, and yet nearly everyone in this gymnasium has tried to find it. All of us tried in sixth grade, and some of us keep trying. There was gold here—everybody knows that—so why isn’t there even a tiny bit left out there in the South Loup? …”
Emily went on for some time about the gold in the South Loup. Amy had heard Emily wax poetic for years, and she had no interest in it. Sure, the gold her ancestors found was great. Amy wished she could have lived when the family was flush with cash, living large. Somehow they lost it all. Her great-grandparents had bought land—lots of land—and lost much of it during the Great Depression. Land, Amy thought, was worthless. They should have stashed the gold so she could have enjoyed some of it. It looked like Emily was going to wrap it up.
“I want to finish by reading a poem that was written about ninety years ago by a woman known as Ptaysan-Wee, the founding mother of Harmony, Nebraska.”
I am not the earth, nor am I the sky—
I am the place where they meet.
I am not the water, nor am I the sun,
But at the moment of sunset, I am the gold
Birthed of their bedding.
I am deep within the living stream,
As at the shedding of blood when a girl becomes a woman.
Here, in me, men become like children—
Stretching their minds beyond the known—
For I am the seeds at the joining of races, I require a new initiation,
I cause the forming of a new tribe.
Memories of wrongs fade and the future ways are unknown, yet—
In me, now, the purest bison pauses from her wanderlust
To exhale a mist of blessing in the cold, still moment of dawn.
Sparrows and prairie dogs come to rest in my dusk,
And a pack of wolves joins forces with the moon to sing of their Creator.
Then, sated by their love-song, they rest beside the sleeping herd,
With their heads bowed humbly upon their paws.
I am the moment you exit the womb, before your first cry,
I am the moment the air steals away and unleashes your spirit
Free from your bones.
I am the entire universe,
I am nowhere.
I am Harmonie.
“I can’t imagine a world without Harmony, because it’s the only place I’ve ever known. I’m not ready to give it up yet, and I know many of you aren’t either.” She said this to the adults in the bleachers on the sides, not to the classmates sitting before her along the basketball baseline, squirming in uncomfortable folding chairs. They couldn’t wait to get the hell out. Amy couldn’t think of a single reason ever to come back.
“Good-bye, Harmony High. I’m sorry to see them tear you down. I don’t know how this could happen, but … I hope, I wish, maybe someday the White Buffalo will roam on the football field again. Anyway, I can’t go anywhere until I find out about that gold. I know it’s ultimately an existential question. Why are we here in the first place? But I have to stay here until I find out!”
Emily sat back down on the stage. Someone passed her a box of tissues.
A few minutes later, walking across the stage to get her diploma, Amy shook her head in disbelief. I never really expected to graduate from high school, she mused. It wasn’t that she wasn’t smart. In fact, Amy admitted to herself, I’m actually pretty damn clever. I do deserve this! Her years of school flashed before her eyes as the line of students receiving diplomas receded ahead of her. After acing ninth grade and seeing no practical application of Romeo and Juliet, algebra, mitochondria, or the Declaration of Independence in her future, she had obliged the whims of her disillusionment for the following three years. On the occasions that she was in class, she perfected her bored look. As for things she did find relevant, she tended toward shopping and boys, which worked out particularly well when a boy was willing to spend his money on her. It’s a certain sort of commerce, she always thought, that I’m really good at!