The Magic Of Ordinary Days Part 3

Five.

I filled the next two days by cooking and cleaning. I waxed the wood flooring over and over all throughout the house until I got it as shiny as a new desktop. During the sunny afternoons, I washed clothes and linens and hung the wet pieces out to dry on the clothesline. One morning I asked Ray to show me how to be of more use around the farm, and he took me out to the barn, where he let me gather the fresh eggs from the chicken coops. He also offered to show me how to milk the cows, but I declined, too embarra.s.sed to tell him I was fearful of those big, noisily chewing animals. The next morning, he showed me how to operate the cream separator. Along with the extra eggs, he took the cream stored in five-gallon cans into La Junta to sell. He gave the remaining skimmed milk to the hogs.

While the laundry dried outside, I wrote letters to Abby and Bea and then drove the truck to town to post them right away. I kept up with news of the war by way of La Junta's station KOKO on Ray's battery-run Philco radio and by reading the newspaper that came in the mail.

As the Allies slowly reclaimed Europe, more reports of n.a.z.i atrocities against the Jews were beginning to come to light. Soviet soldiers had overrun the Polish death camp Majdanek in late July. They hadn't found many prisoners but had found eight hundred thousand pairs of shoes. Throughout the war, occasionally I'd read articles, usually ones buried in the depths of the newspaper, relaying unbelievable reports of ma.s.s murder. Now the news came in of more discovered killing centers, and as I allowed myself to accept that some of the earlier reports might have been true after all, I felt the pages of this new history curl and recoil. I remember the moment I let myself at least partially believe. I remember the smell of bacon lingering in the kitchen after breakfast, the way the light came in softly through the curtains from the window, how it fell on the yellow cotton of my shirtdress. Everything around me stilled and quieted. The apple b.u.t.ter jar sitting open, breadcrumbs scattered about, and Ray's hat off to one side on the table. As I loitered with little to do, perhaps some of the most dreadful events of human history were daily coming to light, each new report more gruesome than the ones before it.

The Allies and the Red Army slowly progressed. Unthinkable tales of ma.s.s graves and gas chambers and other evils still too horrendous to fathom for those of us living comfortably in our own country were slowly emerging. The press coverage was brief, however, and given the exaggeration of atrocities during World War I, an air of disbelief still prevailed. One evening I read a small article I'd found in the back of the news section of the Denver paper. It said that ten thousand Polish Jews had been killed daily; a million Hungarian Jews had been ma.s.sacred. I remembered a vision that had stuck with me, the eight hundred thousand pairs of shoes.

I had to let the paper drop to my lap.

Ray looked up at me quizzically, so I relayed to him what I'd just read. And I told him about the shoes at Majdanek. "What do you suppose happened to the people who had been wearing all those pairs of shoes?" The numbers were staggering. "Could they all have been killed?"

But Ray looked unfazed. He only shrugged and went back to studying his folder of papers, obviously too concerned with pressing matters here on this farm to let the outside world bother him. Or was the thought of so much death simply too painful for him, especially because of Daniel's death? Maybe he couldn't let it sink in just yet.

I continued reading alone. I found out that thousands of Axis soldiers were being taken prisoner, many of them starved and sick, and some of them ending up in American POW camps, one of them in nearby Trinidad. The news reports were full of ruin in Europe, including hunger that most of us couldn't imagine. In another article, I learned that the Dutch had been forced to eat their tulip bulbs just to survive. But with no servicemen around Wilson and surrounded by lush pastures and full fields, the only signs of warfare were the news reports on the radio, what I read in the newspapers, and occasional low-flying practice runs made by pilots from the base at La Junta. It often felt like the war wasn't real, the way we had felt during the first months of the war, when the entire city of Denver seemed to deny the whole thing.

Back in December 1941, everyone in our posh neighborhood had still lit their houses with Christmas lights. But within a year, we were attending war bond rallies, learning what to do during air raids, sewing blackout curtains, even rationing gasoline and holding on to old tires. We saved our toothpaste tubes, tin cans, and fat. We were told that one pound of fat could be turned into a pound of black powder, and that the iron in one old tool could be converted into four hand grenades. Father had to turn over his spare tires and drive around on bald ones. He supported the war, but secretly he sometimes purchased black market gasoline so he could travel around the city as he wished. He wasn't about to ride the streetcar, although many of the rest of us had begun to do so.

By the time the onion and bean harvest began on the farm two days later, I was aching for the city life again, even with its wartime restrictions. The first day of harvest, Ray tried to inform me about what to expect from the busiest season of the year. "Onions and beans got to be pulled by hand. The high school kids are back in school, and all the older boys are in the service," he said. "We need help, and the government needs our food so bad, now they send in the workers."

He sat longer and shuffled his hat about on the table. He kept glancing up at me as if waiting for a response or praise or something else, I didn't know. He reminded me of those men cla.s.sified as 4-F, those disappointed boys who couldn't enlist because of bad vision or holes in their eardrums or some other problem. Treated a bit like freaks, they often went into civilian defense to play their part, anything to gain acceptance. Many of the male students left in college had told me they were asked regularly why they weren't in the service. Ray was so like them, the way he boasted about the importance of farmers.

I groped for something to say. "The harvest must go on."

Ray reached for his hat and started to rise from the table. "Things are sure going to get busy around here."

Thank goodness, I thought.

During the day, the farm was different. The fields filled with j.a.panese workers from Camp Amache in nearby Granada. In the morning Ray took the sides down on the beet box so he could pick them up. They debarked from the truck in front of the house and made their way to the fields, where they worked until sundown.

I tried not to stare, but they were such a study in contrasts. As they arrived in the mornings or as they left at sundown, I found it difficult not to follow them from my kitchen window. Ranging in age from teenage to elderly, some of the younger ones dressed just as the students at the university had been dressing, with rolled-up denims the latest in fashion, and their hair styled in the most recent 'dos. Many of the older women, however, dressed in long skirts and long-sleeved robes tied with a wide cloth belt, and they pinned their hair in a simple bun at the nape of the neck.

I tried to remember the j.a.panese Americans I'd seen in person before. Colorado was home to a small contingent of farmers of j.a.panese descent and even some city dwellers northeast of downtown. I remembered their dark coloring and short, compact statures, but my most vivid memory came from a photo I'd once seen, a photo of picture brides. Among the Issei, immigrant men in the U.S., it had been a common practice to send back to j.a.pan for their wives. Young women who didn't speak a word of English would arrive from the old country, and their future husbands would pick them out from the crowd using the photographs sent by members of their family. As I watched the older women, I wondered how many had come to the U.S. for an arranged marriage. And wasn'tIabit like them? But Ray had decided to marry me knowing I was pregnant and without ever seeing a picture.

What surprised me most were not the interns' differences in dress and appearance. What surprised me was their impeccable demeanor. Despite their imprisonment, despite the fact that we were at war with the country of their ancestors, every one of the workers demonstrated the finest of manners. Every day they pulled the dry bean pods and sh.e.l.led the beans. They pulled up fat onions out of the ground by hand and cropped the tops with sheep shears, grueling work to say the least. But as they boarded the trucks in the evening, even the oldest and most stooped workers still wore smiles on their faces, smiles that to my amazement seemed true.

After the first few days of harvest, I told Ray over breakfast, "Today I'd like to come and watch."

He looked confused.

"To watch what you're doing, to see what it is to harvest."

Ray stopped eating. "I don't understand. Everything's going just fine."

Now I stopped eating, too. "I won't interfere. I just want to learn."

He looked into his plate. "But it's not needed."

Obviously I had hurt him instead of flattered him by my interest. In the past, I had found most people more than willing to show off their skills and knowledge. I thought others enjoyed demonstrating what they knew, but not Ray. He didn't want me to learn anything about farming firsthand, only through his infrequent and bland descriptions.

"Never mind," I said and picked up my fork again. "I'm sorry I mentioned it."

That night, after all the workers had left and Ray came in exhausted and dirty, he took me out beside the barn and showed me the collapsible wooden crates packed with fresh onions. He offered to drive me over to the place where the crates were stored for months at a time in adobe storage buildings. But I could tell he was only doing so to placate me, so I declined. And after that, although I'd been on the farm for only two weeks, I'd already decided to keep my distance from the business of farming.

The next day, I began work on the flower garden. I pulled up the old faded whirligigs, set them aside for repainting, and gathered up the colored stones that Ray's mother had collected. As Ray drove the first truckload of onion crates away toward the storage buildings, I chopped up the deep-rooted weeds in the old flower garden and prepared the soil for bulbs. These things my mother had taught me. Always, she had liked the feel of dirt between her fingers, and of course the results of her efforts-blooming flowers. Even after she had hired on household help, she cared for the flower gardens herself, often taking us girls outside with her. Mother taught us how to break up the frost-hardened topsoil after winter, how to turn and mix the dirt beds in spring, how to plant seeds and bulbs, how to shape and prune the emerging new plants. It was one of the few times we were allowed to get dirty.

In the kitchen, I expanded my efforts beyond basic dishes. Once I cooked two Mexico-style omelets from a recipe I found in the library cookbook. While he ate, Ray glanced up at me after every bite or two. He also made overly kind remarks about the quality of my cooking, but when he thought I wasn't looking, I could see him picking out the chopped onions I had folded into the eggs.

In the afternoons, I walked about the house, outbuildings, and stock pond. Sometimes I could see the dark spots of the workers' bodies far off in the distant fields. I worked in the flower garden and then made my way to the back shed. There I found other artifacts-a wire rug beater, a box of fabric sc.r.a.ps that had probably been collected for quilting, an aluminum teakettle, and a parlor carpet broom. The hound, whose name I found out was Franklin, dubbed in honor of our President, kept me company and often smacked his loose lips or rolled on his back as I was expanding my collection. But I wondered what to do with it all. Certainly the artifacts should be kept for future generations to study and enjoy, perhaps even in a museum. But whom could I trust to do that? Each day I was adding to the burlap bag until it rose to the brim with the pieces I thought were most worth salvaging. But what then? Perhaps, on my next trip to town, I would inquire of any collectors in the area.

Over dinner, I said to Ray, "Martha told me your grandparents once built a tarpaper shack near here. Do you know where the remains are?"

Ray finished chewing. "I know where they used to be."

"Used to be?"

He shrugged. "I tore it down and plowed under the ground about two springs ago."

I had to laugh. "You have to be joking."

Now he looked confused. "It was just a bunch of weathered old boards. That's all that was left." His lips came together, barely moving as he spoke. "It wasn't anything to look at, I tell you."

"In the ground," I told him. "There's no telling what pieces of history might have been in the ground, under those boards."

He cleared his throat. "I needed that land for crops. People overseas are starving."

Of course, I knew this already. "In just one look inside one of your sheds, I found valuable antiques. There's no telling what I might have found around that shack."

He b.u.mped the edge of the table with his fist. "Never thought of it."

"Well, it's done." I found myself shaking my head, then made myself stop. "Ray, I've noticed that you have no family photos, no personal items that belonged to your parents in this house." I deliberately didn't mention Daniel. "Where do you keep those things?"

He cleared his throat again. "Don't rightly know. Better ask Martha."

I couldn't hide my frustration. "You have nothing?"

He shrugged, then rose from the table. He took long strides across the room and clumped through the door of the bunkroom. He let the door close heavily behind him.

The next evening, with Franklin sniffing along at my heels, I walked one of the narrow roadways, down rutted tracks between fields. In the distance, I could see the workers. Bent over the ground, their bodies hooked like boomerangs, they were working later than usual that day. As I drew close to a recently dug onion field, I could hear the hum of their conversations marked with occasional spurts of laughter. Two young women stood apart from the rest of the workers, directly in my path. Engrossed in pursuit and moving ever so cautiously, they were either studying the ground or something near to it. One of the girls held a notebook in her hand. They didn't see me move near.

I took another step closer, and they jumped together. "Excuse us," one of them said. Then they turned away and began to walk off.

"No please," I said. "What are you studying?"

They turned back, and one girl answered with a smile, "b.u.t.terflies."

Standing and facing me together now, I saw that they were nearly identical in stature, with the same shade of glossy, blue-black hair fixed in bubble-cut style. They wore checkered cotton work shirts and slacks over sneakers. The older of the two had a fuller face with a few pockmarks on her cheeks. The younger of the two had a face perfectly oval in shape and not a mark on it. A practice rug and a masterpiece, I thought. And certainly they were sisters.

"Do you collect?"

They laughed together, at the same pitch and stopping at the same moment. But there the similarities ended. Lorelei, the younger of the two Umahara sisters, introduced herself, flipped a curl around her ear, and said, "Rose could never kill anything." She held my eyes with a firm, bold-eyed gaze and spoke with a siren of a voice that told me she didn't bow to anyone.

Rose's voice had half the strength of her sister's, and she talked with crossed arms and lowered lids, as if uncertainty were her frequent companion. "We log our observations in this notebook."

"I'm Livvy." Turning back toward the house, I said, "I live in the farmhouse."

When both girls looked back down to the ground, back to the place where earlier they had been studying, I asked, "And what did I cause you to miss?"

Again they laughed. "We thought it was the Purple Hairstreak, a b.u.t.terfly only found in Colorado or nearby," Rose answered. "But upon closer look, we found that it wasn't."

"We look for b.u.t.terflies," Lorelei said. "It's our hobby."

I knew little of insects and honestly had never found them of much interest, but I didn't want them to leave yet. "Are there many species?" I asked.

"Oh, yes. Thousands of varieties," answered Lorelei. "And the names are as wonderful as the creatures themselves."

"Silver-Spotted Skippers," said Rose.

"Eyed Hawkmoths," said Lorelei.

"And Speckled Woods."

My mother had once felt the same way about flower names. I remembered how the words had rolled off her tongue like silk off the bolt. Lady Slippers, Monkeyflowers, Snapdragons, and Johnny Jump-ups. At the university, the professors who genuinely loved their subjects were always the most interesting teachers. Enthusiasm for a topic made it enticing to others. And these two girls were clearly crazy for b.u.t.terflies.

"Lovely," I said.

After a moment of silence, Franklin weaseled up between the girls and me, sniffing over the ground and effectively scaring off any b.u.t.terflies that might still have been near. Lorelei folded the notebook and stuck it under her arm. Rose glanced back over her shoulder, toward the other workers. Clearly they were reluctant to talk longer, but before they left, I invited them to come visit me at the house. "I have cold bottles of Coca-Cola in the icebox that I'd love to share," I told them.

They smiled, nodded, and said they would come, but I didn't know whether to plan on it or not. They turned back to the field, and I headed back to the house. Before I left their sight completely, however, I looked back over my shoulder. As they walked away, both girls, their silhouettes dark against the deepening sunshine, stepped about on tiptoes, around the dandelions, looking for what I could only presume were more b.u.t.terflies. The sight of them together, backed by the sunlight, made me turn and walk away even faster.

Abby and Bea. Only a few hours' travel away in Denver, they might as well have been oceans away.

Six.

The U.S. forces infiltrated Germany for the first time in mid-September, and we in the U.S. heard details of the offensive over the next few days by radio and newspapers. The progress made an Allied victory in Europe seem inevitable, but in the Pacific, over nine thousand men died in eleven days of fighting to capture just one small island named Peleliu. Even as the end of the war drew nearer, the news kept getting bleaker.

The following Sunday, Ray convinced me to attend church, something that, for reasons not yet clear to me, I had been avoiding. But I longed for a change of company, so I donned what had always been my favorite Sunday suit and joined Ray, who wore his brown suit again for the first time since our wedding day.

Outside the church building, I saw many parked cars and trucks, all of them covered in the layer of brown dust that had already grown familiar to me, grime that disguised the true colors of most everything. Groups of people worked their way into the building, letting me know that despite the outward appearance of emptiness down the web of roads, indeed many people lived there. Before the service began, I met some of the congregation members and noticed that here, wartime fashion had yet to be introduced. In the face of plain prints and faded hats, I became conscious of the quality of my suit. Ray introduced me as his wife, and judging by the surprised looks we received, I didn't think he had told anyone I was coming. At Ray's side, however, I received a much different response from the one I'd received in Trinidad, alone. With him, people didn't hesitate to smile and greet me.

"So pleased to meet you," one woman said. "Goodness me." Then she congratulated Ray.

Another woman said, "We had no idea."

Her husband pumped Ray's hand up and down, then patted him on the back before we entered the sanctuary.

Reverend Case began his service with the usual prayers, hymns, and Bible readings. But then he moved from behind the pulpit and spoke directly to the congregation without the burden of that barrier between us. In the sermon, his message was one of forgiveness and sympathy for our enemies.

"I hope we can be so great a nation that we choose charity in the face of victory." He paused for reflection. "Sympathy over condemnation."

It felt as if he were engaged in intimate conversation alone and with each one of us. "I hope that we may find love for the countrymen of our enemy." Then he stood perfectly still. "The common man among our enemies may be more victim than we know."

Graciousness against our enemies? In Denver, I had been more accustomed to dirty "Heine" jokes and "Jinx the j.a.ps" rallies than to the substance of this talk. At one point in the early years of the war, a game atmosphere had even prevailed. Everyone had believed that the U.S. forces were obviously superior, that victory would be easy. Bent on revenge for Pearl Harbor, we caricatured our enemy, attended parties and rallies, and held parades. It was definitely a good-versus-evil thing, and we in the U.S. were the good guys. But after years of it, I had grown weary of celebrations and children wearing cast-off uniforms and shooting toy guns. And now, in this unlikely place, I was listening to words that mirrored my sentiments. The difference between Reverend Case and the stern men of the pulpit I had known before was remarkable. After the first years of the war, I never thought of celebrating victories in the same way that once I'd done it before. With so much loss taken along the way, victories didn't feel very triumphant anyway.

"Let us pray for the relief of all suffering, for comfort and prosperity for all, for the end to every skirmish, battle, and war in this world."

"Amen," we said together.

After the service ended, Reverend Case held me back in the sanctuary for a moment. With one of his gracious smiles, he said, "I'm so happy to see you again. How are you liking it here?"

I didn't want to lie. "It's peaceful." But still, he looked concerned. "I enjoyed your sermon."

He put one hand on my back and gave a soft pat. "You're among friends here, Olivia." Then he led me into the kitchen area, where we chatted with Martha, Hank, and the children.

Ray then introduced me to the infamous Mrs. Pratt, who indeed handed over a cake. She grinned and touched my sleeve. "What a wonderful thing that Ray has finally married." Cake in hand, Ray headed for the door. Mrs. Pratt moved closer. "And how did you and Ray meet?"

In one instant, I knew why I hadn't wanted to attend church.

My father planned to tell everyone in Denver that I had eloped. During the war years, two people taking off together and marrying on the sly was a perfectly acceptable thing to do. Rushed weddings happened every day, sometimes just hours before a soldier was shipping out. Not until the baby came would people realize that I had to get married.

I said, "I eloped."

Mrs. Pratt looked baffled. Then Ray was back at my side. "We met in Denver several months ago."

"How romantic." She was genuinely pleased. "I never knew you traveled to Denver," she said to Ray, then winked.

Although a potluck was planned for noontime, we declined to stay, as Ray said he had another place he wished to take me. On the way home, he explained, "There's a fishing hole nearby. Thought you might like to see it."

Truthfully, I'd never liked fishing. Once my uncle had taken Abby, Bea, and me out to a pier on a lake, but after a few minutes of no bites, my sisters and I had abandoned our poles and gone off exploring in the woods on our own. But anything would be an improvement over spending the rest of the day at the house. So when Ray drove us home, we changed into denims and shirts, then headed out again. At the edge of Holbrook Lake, Ray led me to an overturned rowboat. He righted it and slipped the bow into the water, keeping the stern on sh.o.r.e so I could hop in without getting wet. A minute or so later, he pushed us off. Ray dipped the oar on one side and then the other. Soon we were in the center of the lake surrounded by dragonflies courting over the surface of the water.

"Middle of the day's not the best time for fishing," Ray said. "But maybe we'll get lucky."

r.i.m.m.i.n.g the bank were stands of cottonwoods and fingery willows. Pheasants prattled about in the branches near the ground, and in the top of the tallest tree, a bleached bone of spindly arms, I saw a tangled nest that could only have been home to something quite large, perhaps a hawk or an eagle. Ray cast out a line and waited. I leaned back on the wooden slat that served as my seat and closed my eyes into the sunlight. I had to admit it was restful here, on this pond.

"It's nice," I said to Ray without opening my eyes. "Thank you for bringing me." And thank you for lying to Mrs. Pratt.

I could barely hear his voice over the sound of whirring dragonflies and tender licks of water against the sides of the boat. "Hoped you'd like it."

I kicked off my sneakers in the bottom of the boat and fanned out my toes. Later, I felt Ray shift his weight, then I heard him reeling in his line. In the bright light outside my lids, I saw that he had caught something. "Cutthroat," Ray said as the fish flipped in the water at our side. Ray lifted it into the air, where the creature began its struggle for life.